On October 1-3, at the Borgo Finocchieto estate in Italy, Sunnylands hosted a select group of food, agriculture, and climate experts to provide early feedback to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ new Roadmap to Jointly Achieve Climate and Food Security and Nutrition Goals.

Global consensus holds that food systems lie at the crux of humanity’s efforts to make the planet safe, sustainable, resilient, and able to feed and nourish every human being. Unfortunately, as the Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres has said, conflict, climate, economic shocks, and inequalities are driving food insecurity. As a result, up to 780 million people do not have enough to eat and more than 3 billion can’t afford a healthy diet.

Recognizing the linkage between agrifood systems and climate change, and as tasked by Secretary-General Guterres, FAO created a landmark new  “global roadmap” to end global hunger by 2030 and limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2050 through agrifood systems transformation. This roadmap sets out a multi-year strategy for how agrifood systems transformation can support climate, hunger, and malnutrition goals, including by setting out a portfolio of solutions for investment and policy reforms, and creating accountability mechanisms for achieving them.

Sunnylands’ retreat assembled a select group of international leaders from the public and private sector to review the draft roadmap, provide feedback, and offer changes before it was formally presented to the world by FAO at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, known as COP28, in Dubai. Participants were open and honest in their feedback, which led to meaningful edits to the document and significant changes to FAO’s release strategy at COP28. The Roadmap was successfully unveiled at the COP28 meetings on December 10 and work is now underway to implement it.