Africa’s food systems are at the forefront of the global climate crisis. Projections indicate that the continent will be severely impacted by climate change as vulnerability is high, with low levels of adaptive capacity and resilience to respond to shocks or to pre-empt them. With weak and/or inappropriate adaptation measures, models predict that by 2100, climate change will lead to an equivalent annual GDP loss in Africa of 10 to 20 percent (Trisos et al., n.d.). In the past 50 years, droughts have claimed the lives of more than half a million people and led to economic losses of more than US$ 70 billion. Extreme weather events are likely to cost the continent US$ 50 billion annually by 2050 (WMO, 2020). Evidence suggests that GDP per capita in Africa is on average 13.6 percent lower than it would be if human-caused global warming since 1991 had not occurred (Diffenbaugh & Burke, 2019).

The continent’s agricultural systems are still largely rainfed (more than 95 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and 75 percent in Near-East and North Africa) combined with low mechanization, the continent’s food systems are at highly vulnerable to changes to its climate. The adverse impacts are particularly acute and severe for people living in African countries south of the Sahara (IPCC, 2022)

Projections to 2050 indicate that rising temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns could lead to crop failures in some areas in most years. Visible effects include changes to the start and end dates of growing seasons, as well as the frequency and intensity of dry spells and heavy rainfall events (GCA, 2021). Under a 2°C warming scenario, crop yields across Africa are projected to decrease by a mean of 10 percent (Munang & Andrews, 2014), while warming beyond 2°C will cause crop yields to fall by up to 20 percent (Carleton 2022). All present-day cropping areas for maize, millet, and sorghum in Africa will become unsuitable if warming reaches 2°C (Gregory et al., 2005), and heat stress from rising temperatures is also expected to cause losses in meat and milk production of US$ 2.5 billion and US$ 708 million respectively, by 2045 (GCA, 2022).

Findings

• Africa’s food systems must adapt to a changing climate to ensure that they continue to support livelihoods and generate sustainable incomes, provide nutrition, and do so in an environmentally sound manner.

• Interventions and plans must extend their focus beyond purely agricultural solutions to whole food systems, ensuring that the vast variety of actors across value chains benefit from them.

• Financing for climate adaptation across food systems faces approximately the same technical and structural challenges as agricultural financing in Africa: high perceived risks, low liquidity, long timeframes, lack of large investment grade projects, and high upfront capital and transaction costs. According to the latest Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of 51 African countries by January 2022, the estimated need for investments in adaptation (across all sectors) between 2020 and 2030 adds up to US$ 579 billion. This equates to approximately US$ 58 billion per year until 2030. In comparison, average tracked adaptation financing for African countries over 2019 and 2020 was US$ 11.4 billion per year (Guzman, et al., 2022).

• The economic imperative to support adaptation in Africa’s food systems is clear: The Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) estimates that the annual cost of inaction including paying for repeated disaster relief and recovery after floods and droughts can be as high as US$ 210 billion (GCA, 2021). While adaptation cannot prevent all losses and damages, taking effective action by investing in research and extension services, water management, infrastructure, land restoration, and climate information services would cost US$ 15 billion per year (0.93 percent of GDP). In other words, the cost of action on climate adaptation and food systems is less than a tenth of the cost of inaction (GCA, 2021).

• An array of innovative financing tools and mechanisms are available and if deployed effectively could complement existing tools and mechanisms to mobilize finance for building resilient food systems. African countries are investing significant national resources in response to climate change, much more could be done to build stronger institutions and formulate sound policies. This must go hand in hand with donor countries living up to their pledge of channeling US$ 100 billion a year to less-wealthy countries by 2025, including doubling adaptation flows for developing countries by 2025 to US$ 40 billion per year.

Case studies featured in this report (Benin, Mali, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe) show that policy and institutional innovations together with ground-level programmatic interventions, have enabled these countries to mobilize additional climate finance for food systems’ adaptation. Drawing some key lessons from the case studies, the report concludes by offering a set of recommendations for action by African governments and their partners.

The Malabo Montpellier Panel hence makes the following six recommendations for both, policymakers as well as donor agencies and institutions:

• Systematically align the food and climate agenda and build the technical knowledge and capacity that straddles climate, agriculture, and finance across the government.

• Mainstream climate change adaptation and resilience-building activities into policies and investment decision-making across government. Develop a pipeline of bankable projects focused on food systems and related infrastructures and supported by investible adaptation plans. Support locally led adaptation efforts to ensure that resilience-building interventions meet the needs of the most vulnerable and have sustainable impact.

• Scale up efforts to attract private capital for adaptation across food systems.

• Design reliable tracking mechanism and simple digital tools to record climate finance flows at the national level.

• Streamline, coordinate, and rationalize policies at donor institutions to unlock opportunities for recipient countries to access more and better finance (e.g. central repository that provides information on sources and availability of climate finance).