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agroecology
Climate Negotiators Will Talk About Anything But Finance and Decarbonization
While Bonn has spent considerable time debating indicators, methodologies, and reporting frameworks, developing countries continue to raise concerns about access to finance and the means needed to turn plans into action.
Jun 18, 2026
The climate negotiations are beginning to feel like a masterclass in avoiding the obvious. Every year, negotiators arrive with new targets, new initiatives, and new buzzwords.
This year, one of the biggest announcements revolves around electrification. The incoming COP31 Presidencies have put forward a target to move from 20% to 35% electrification by 2035. At first glance, it sounds ambitious. Yet the key question is what will power that electrification.
An electric vehicle connected to a fossil fuel-powered grid does not necessarily deliver meaningful emissions reductions. Likewise, an electric factory running on gas-generated electricity cannot be considered evidence of a low-carbon transition. Electrification delivers climate benefits only when it is powered by renewable energy and accompanied by a clear road map to phase out fossil fuels.
Yet a fundamental contradiction persists. While governments celebrate record growth in renewable energy, they continue approving new oil, gas, and coal projects. Renewable energy capacity is increasing, but fossil fuel production is increasing too. Nearly 30 years after the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiators are still struggling to confront the primary driver of climate change.
While developed countries point to existing contributions as evidence of progress, developing countries remain confronted with a widening gap between what is needed and what is being delivered.
The same tendency to search for new distractions is emerging in the agriculture discussions. Instead of prioritizing agroecology, which already provides proven solutions for adaptation, food security, biodiversity protection, and resilience, increasing attention is being given to artificial intelligence. While technology certainly has a role to play, farmers facing droughts, floods, soil degradation, and declining yields are not asking for algorithms. They are asking for secure access to land, water, seeds, finance, and support.
The adaptation discussions reveal a similar disconnect. While Bonn has spent considerable time debating indicators, methodologies, and reporting frameworks, developing countries continue to raise concerns about access to finance and the means needed to turn plans into action. Discussions under the Baku Adaptation Roadmap exposed broad agreement that major barriers continue to prevent finance from reaching countries and communities at the scale required. Yet when the conversation turned to solutions, momentum quickly faded. The same pattern resurfaced during discussions on the Global Goal on Adaptation, where developed countries showed far greater interest in technical discussions than in finance and implementation. Meanwhile, communities on the ground are left waiting for support that remains trapped in negotiation rooms.
And when adaptation falls short, those impacts do not simply disappear. They become loss and damage. Yet despite being recognized as the third pillar of climate action, loss and damage continues to be treated as an afterthought. During the opening plenaries in Bonn, Ghana, speaking on behalf of the Africa Group of Negotiators, and Timor-Leste, speaking on behalf of the Least Developed Countries, highlighted a striking contradiction: While countries repeatedly call for balance across climate action, there is still no comprehensive agenda item dedicated to loss and damage under the negotiations.
This diplomatic stalling now clashes directly with international law. In its landmark Climate Change Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice affirmed that states have a legal obligation to protect the climate system and cooperate to address climate harm. By clarifying that breaches of climate obligations may constitute internationally wrongful acts, the court strengthened the legal basis for responsibility, restitution, and compensation.
At the center of all these discussions lies a familiar issue: finance. The mitigation and adaptation ambitions embedded in the Paris Agreement were always contingent on the provision of climate finance under Article 9.1. Every ambition discussed in Bonn, from adaptation and resilience to renewable energy and implementation, ultimately depends on whether developing countries receive adequate support.
That tension is playing out directly in Bonn's finance negotiations. The two major finance discussions this year, the Climate Finance Work Programme and the Veredas Dialogue on Article 2.1(c), exposed a persistent divide. Developing countries continue to stress that climate finance is a legal obligation and the foundation for implementing climate action. Developed countries, meanwhile, continue pushing broader discussions centered on mobilizing finance from multiple sources, particularly private finance.
Ultimately, both processes highlighted the same reality: While developed countries point to existing contributions as evidence of progress, developing countries remain confronted with a widening gap between what is needed and what is being delivered.
Against this backdrop, the establishment of the Just Transition Mechanism at COP30 stands out as one of the few discussions focused on implementation rather than process. After years of dialogue under the UAE Just Transition Work Programme, Parties recognized the need for a dedicated mechanism capable of connecting ambition with delivery. Discussions in Bonn are now turning to how it can support countries navigating profound economic and social transformation.
For developing countries, this discussion goes far beyond climate policy. Energy access, industrialization, economic diversification, poverty eradication, and job creation are central to the transition many countries are trying to build. Whether the mechanism becomes a meaningful tool for support or simply another addition to the climate architecture will depend on the choices parties make in the months ahead. Without that shift from process to implementation, every year spent debating distractions is another year spent delaying the action we already know is needed.
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Could High Fertilizer Prices Change the Face of Farming?
The development of agroecological and regenerative approaches would see a food system that is not only less vulnerable to the supply chain shocks being felt today, but would be better for the environment, human health, and animals.
May 17, 2026
The global disruptions caused by the war in Iran have brought renewed focus to the vulnerability of global fossil fuel supply chains. But what has received less attention is how the war also highlights the vulnerability of industrial agriculture supply chains reliant on massive amounts of chemical fertilizers and other inputs. Like oil and gas, these frequently travel long distances through turbulent waters.
A big advantage of renewable energy technologies like solar is that sunlight doesn’t have to pass through the Straits of Hormuz. The same can be said for many of the inputs required for agroecological and regenerative farming systems. The development of these approaches would see a food system that is not only less vulnerable to the supply chain shocks being felt today, but would be better for the environment, human health, and animals. It would be healthier, kinder, and more resilient.
A global economic recession and possible food shortages are looming as the war in Iran grinds on. While the devastating impact of the current conflict on people, their families, and communities must be foremost in our minds, the shock waves from the crisis are having system-wide impacts on energy supplies, cost of living, and food prices. As the seasons turn and farmers prepare to plant their crops, they are facing a new pressure: a sudden and critical rise in fertilizer and fuel costs.
As the price of petrol and diesel have skyrocketed since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, so too have fertilizer costs due to shortages of urea and ammonia. A third of the world's key fertilizer chemicals pass through the Strait, and prices have risen steeply since the outbreak of war, with predictions that prices for nitrogen-based fertilizers like urea could roughly double if the war drags on. Alongside a rise in red diesel prices, agricultural profit margins are highly volatile.
The current war is heinous, but inadvertently it has created an inflexion point, a moment to rethink global distribution of goods, and our broken food system.
Farmers taking the financial hit will likely pass on the costs to the consumer, but this isn’t sustainable and undermines the financial, social, and environmental health of the global food system. What if we flip it? Could the Middle East War not only accelerate a shift to renewable energy but also reduce our dependency on fertilizer-hungry crops? Legumes such as beans and peas, which fix nitrogen in soils, root vegetables, soybeans, and hardy grains such as rye could be viable alternatives.
Since the Second World War, a burgeoning (and hugely profitable for a few) chemical industry has created food systems dependent on inputs such as fossil fuel-based fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. While delivering greater crop surplus, industrial farming has brought new problems: algal blooms, less wildlife and pollinators, monocultures, local air pollution, global climate change, and the loss of small-scale farming and farmers.
We’ve reached a tipping point; we overproduce food, a third of which is wasted, and too many people are eating too much of the wrong types of food. Noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes are becoming a much bigger health burden than infectious diseases. Meanwhile, entrenched inequalities mean that, despite a global food surplus, millions of people go hungry every day, and 2.6 billion people can’t afford a healthy diet. An insatiable demand for meat now means that there are over 76 billion farmed chicken, pigs, and cattle in production around the planet, driving a largely invisible burden of animal suffering.
The current war is heinous, but inadvertently it has created an inflexion point, a moment to rethink global distribution of goods, and our broken food system. Growing crops that don’t need so many fossil fuel-derived chemicals but still provide enough food to feed our populations, and sustainable farming for current and future generations, is where we should be heading. We need to transition away from industrial agriculture, to food systems built on fairness—to people, animals, and the planet—not one geared toward feeding animals to feed ourselves. It’s a stark reality that over one-third of land used to grow arable crops is used to grow crops for animal feed.
Animal farming industry groups have been calling for public money to weather supply shocks, which begs the question of how resilient are the industrial systems we currently rely on. The US government provided $1 billion in response to avian flu, for example, while the European Union directed €46.7 million to Italian farmers, plus another €15 million for weather and animal-disease-related impacts in parts of Europe, and Canada extended livestock tax relief linked to bovine TB and extreme weather. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is also calling for urgent action in the form of government funds to protect the countries heavily exposed to import disruptions.
It’s clear that the current industrial animal farming model is not resilient. It depends heavily on unstable supply chains exposed to geopolitical shocks, climate change, extreme weather events, and disease outbreaks, and is a deeply inefficient use of plant resources to feed the world. Yet public money keeps being used to stabilize food systems that are structurally fragile, rather than directed toward sustainable and humane agriculture.
The current crisis in the Middle East has once again spotlighted our dependence on fossil fuels for energy and for food production. The growing success of renewable energy technologies—wind, solar, electric vehicles, and heat pumps—provides a roadmap to achieving energy independence at local and national levels. This has been achieved through several decades of policy and fiscal support, such as feed-in tariffs, technological advances, and growing public support.
Changing how we produce food could advance rapidly on the coat tails of our energy revolution. Calls for a just transition in farming and food production are growing from independent, small-scale farmers to development organizations, from Indigenous people’s groups to animal welfare charities. This transition would pivot away from destructive, insecure industrial agriculture toward more equitable, humane, and sustainable forms of agriculture, such as agroecology.
Rethinking food is not a nice to have, it’s essential if we are to strengthen the resilience of farmers, consumers, and nations, reducing exposure to geopolitical tensions, supply-chain disruptions, and future global shocks.
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Our Global Food System Is on the Brink of Collapse
The impact on fuel prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is the canary in the agrifood coal mine.
Apr 17, 2026
What does Big Ag have to do with the Strait of Hormuz? A lot, actually, when you consider that almost every so-called efficiency that industrial agriculture relies on to operate flows through this waterway. And now it is closed, threatening global food security.
And what is the primary source of the problem? Our reliance on fossil fuels.
What do fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics have in common?
First of all, each is a leg of the stool that makes up the rickety foundation of our global agrifood system.
Plastics are involved in every stage of our food and farming systems from soil to spoon: plastic polymers are used in some mulches, agrichemical containers are generally made of plastics, harvest crates and produce packages are often plastic, most processed foods are packaged in plastic or plastic-lined containers, and single-use plastics are still widely used in plates, bowls, cups, straws, napkins, and utensils.
In the 1960s, the world used between 60 and 70 million tonnes of fertilizer (synthetic nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, plus organic nitrogen) per year. But that usage has steadily risen ever since: in 2023 we used nearly 183 million tonnes of fertilizer. This rise can be attributed in part to the rising needs of a growing global population, but it is more indicative of our over-reliance on fertilizers as a way to combat the increasing effects of climate change. This season, farmers are already reporting untenable increases in fertilizer prices.
Big Ag has and will continue to rely on Big Oil to make Big Money as long as they can, but the United States’ and Israel’s unconstitutional war on Iran starkly illustrates just how fragile this house of cards is.
Pesticides are the other side of the agrichemical input coin. Fertilizers and pesticides go hand-in-hand, when it comes to global agrifood systems. The foundation of industrialized farming is monocropping (growing a single crop over and over on the same piece of land). The problem with monocropping is that it is extremely input intensive because monocropped land is more vulnerable to pest and disease pressure. And over time, this vulnerability increases, requiring more and more pesticides as tolerance builds. This creates a vicious cycle called the Pesticide Treadmill that is hard for farmers to escape without support.
But, critically, synthetic plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides are all derivatives of fossil fuels, mass quantities of which must be funneled through one waterway before becoming various inputs and components of our centralized, industrialized agrifood system. Rather than curbing our use of climate-harming fossil fuel-derived plastics, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, our agrifood systems use more and more each year, exacerbating the problem and further locking us into a fragile food system.
A Strait Chokepoint
According to the Congressional Research Service, over a quarter of the world’s supply of oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz, impacting farmers’ ability to get seeds in the ground and food to tables. Additionally, 20% of natural gas transits the Strait, which is a component of many agrichemical inputs. But, byproducts of oil and gas production also pass through the Strait, including helium which is used in semiconductor manufacturing (semiconductors like silicon are necessary for all modern technology), and urea, which is one of the most commonly used synthetic fertilizers. Over a third of the world’s urea must pass through the Strait.
In short, global agrifood systems rely intrinsically on fossil fuels and their byproducts to function, and when supply lines are disrupted, even briefly, the domino effects could be catastrophic. This article is not meant to be a metaphor, but an urgent warning and a window to our way out.
The most important—and maddening—thing to know is that our agrifood systems need not rely so heavily on fossil fuels and their byproducts to feed the world’s people.
Big Ag has and will continue to rely on Big Oil to make Big Money as long as they can, but the United States’ and Israel’s unconstitutional war on Iran starkly illustrates just how fragile this house of cards is. As countries around the world issue energy conservation mandates and brace for worsening inflation and supply chain instability, we should consider how agroecological farming practices could not only make our agrifood systems safer by reducing exposures of harmful pesticides and curb climate change, but also make the systems that feed us more resilient by decentralizing them, improving resilience to climate change-induced drought, floods, and pest pressures, and extricating them out from under the thumb of fossil fuel corporations.
Corporate greed has optimized humanity to the brink of mass starvation. But the principles of agroecology center food sovereignty (the opposite of corporate control), labor justice, and land stewardship.
Food systems grounded in agroecology are ones in which:
- All people have access to healthy, safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food.
- Farmers and agricultural workers work with the land to protect, restore, and sustain natural resources and ecosystems.
- Agriculture utilizes ecological management practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improving adaptation and resilience to climate change.
- Synthetic chemical inputs are reduced or eliminated whenever possible.
- The production, sharing, commerce, and consumption of food is built on an economy which prioritizes thriving communities, resilient local markets, and worker rights.
- Diverse cultures, identities, and knowledge systems are embraced along with equitable forms of social organization.
- Power in food and farming systems is redistributed; shifting away from transnational corporations so that the rights of food producers, farm workers, and agricultural communities are centered.
These principles are not far fetched; they’re economically viable solutions that are being practiced successfully around the world already. Systemic shifts toward global agrifood systems that prioritize the principles of agroecology could help us to solve the triple planetary crises of pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change.
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