Key messages:

• As climate change became a central focus of food policy research, research expanded from projecting global and national impacts on agriculture to assessing risks to households and individuals and options for policy responses, and from a focus on mitigation toward actions that support both mitigation and adaptation.
• Model-based projections broadly agree on the key agricultural impacts of climate change: declining productivity growth and nutrient density of crops and reduced food security, with the greatest impacts at lower latitudes and in low-income countries.
• Research focused on identifying and reducing risks for vulnerable populations, particularly small-scale producers and women, identifies “hot spots” and effective adaptation strategies.
• Farm-level adaptations show promise for protecting livelihoods and food security but have not been adopted at scale. Research explores the barriers to greater impact of these innovations.
• Climate-smart agriculture research emphasizes synergies among adaptation, mitigation, and productivity goals at the farm level, and shows that climate-smart practices can reduce hunger.
• Evidence on disparities in climate impacts between high- and low-income countries and within countries, where impacts are greater on marginalized peoples, supports policies for climate justice.

Looking to the future, policy research on climate and food systems should aim to:

• Improve identification of hotspots and targeting of resources by combining yield projections from crop models with information on the local importance of crops and local indicators of vulnerability, including social inequalities. • Increase capacity for modeling the frequency and impact of extreme climate events and better incorporate feedback mechanisms, impacts on labor productivity, economic growth, and nutrition, to allow comparison of the effectiveness of potential policy responses.
• Identify and help to prioritize scalable adaptation strategies that can be effective both at large and local scales.
• Identify effective mechanisms to address climate injustice and ways to make climate governance more representative of vulnerable communities, including women and poor populations.
• Combine climate modeling and household survey analysis at the country level to provide policy-relevant foresight and evidence to decision-makers as countries undergo major socioeconomic and environmental changes in coming years.
• Inform the design and implementation of climate interventions and policies that better address broader development goals such as food security, nutrition, and health.