LocationsWhy connecting people is key to unlocking unique climate, agriculture and food security benefits
Connecting people, transforming food systems
October 15, 2026
Global hunger declined for the third consecutive year in 2025, with 43 million fewer hungry people in the world than at the 2022 peak.
Photo: UNDP Colombia
Ask most people what “innovation” means and they’ll describe a new technology, product or tool. But what if some of the most important innovations for the future of food are less tangible? What if innovation is also about changing how people work together, how institutions make decisions and how knowledge is shared?
That’s the idea we want to explore this World Food Day, under the theme “Innovate today, nourish tomorrow.” It’s also a running thread through our joint UNDP-FAO SCALA programme which, since 2020, has worked directly with diverse groups of stakeholders in more than 20 countries to identify and implement transformative climate and biodiversity solutions that strengthen agriculture and food security.
Why this matters now
The latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report gives us some reason for hope: global hunger declined for the third consecutive year in 2025, with 43 million fewer hungry people in the world than at the 2022 peak. But the same report also makes clear that this progress is fragile. Around 645 million people still face hunger and 2.7 billion people can’t afford a healthy diet.
Climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification are among the main contributors to this ongoing hunger and malnutrition crisis. And, as we experience a particularly strong El Niño cycle in 2026, we can no longer afford to ignore some of the glaring signs. One of the worst cereal harvests in Europe in the last half century after record heat and drought, erratic rains, prolonged drought and escalating food prices in the Horn of Africa and flash floods in the Bhote Koshi–Trishuli corridor in Nepal in August, which showed how quickly a sudden shock can lead to devastating loss of human, animal and crop life.
These may seem like freak events in an anomaly year but climate projections make them likely to happen more frequently. And for people whose livelihoods depend on agriculture—crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture, as well as the wider value chains that connect producers to markets—the consequences are deeply personal. A drought can mean a failed harvest. A flood can wash away homes, livestock and years of investment. A shifting growing season can make long-established practices less reliable, putting pressure on resources and increasing the risk of poverty and food insecurity.
FAO–UNDP collaboration under the SCALA programme brings together the two agencies’ perspectives and networks to implement long-lasting actions to boost agriculture and food security.
Photo: FAO/Candida VillaLobos
Partnering for sustainable and transformative benefits
As global coordinators of a unique agriculture-focused climate change programme jointly implemented by two United Nations agencies, we strive to ensure that vulnerable rural populations are supported with the best solutions that science, technology and money can provide. However, building long-term adaptive capacity and resilience in agrifood systems goes beyond this. Lasting change, change that will transform these systems for a sustainable future, needs governments, producers, communities, researchers, financial institutions, businesses and development partners moving in the same direction.
Over the past six years, this has been the focus of the FAO–UNDP collaboration under the SCALA programme. Bringing our two agencies’ perspectives and networks together has created opportunities to connect climate commitments with the policies, investments and institutions needed to implement long-lasting actions to boost agriculture and food security.
In practice, what this looks like is different in every country, but one lesson keeps coming back. Transformative changes rarely happen from one level alone. That is why efforts to connect and empower relevant stakeholders at all levels and at all stages of project planning and implementation cycles continue to be SCALA hallmarks in Africa, Asia and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean.
What innovative partnerships look like in three SCALA countries
In Côte d’Ivoire, SCALA is supporting an agroforestry approach by bringing together government institutions, communities and local development agencies to help farmers produce food and earn an income while restoring the land on which their livelihoods depend.
In Assaoufoué, Bongouanou, women cassava growers are planting Acacia mangium trees alongside their crops. On paper, it’s a straightforward approach to agroforestry. In practice, it raised understandable fears about land tenure – in a country where women own less than 15 percent of agricultural land – and about trees squeezing out space for food. It wasn’t a new technology that served to assuage these fears; it was a partnership.
In Côte d’Ivoire, SCALA supports an agroforestry approach to help farmers produce food and earn an income while restoring the land.
Photos: FAO/Candida VillaLobos
Working with the local forestry development agency (SODEFOR) and community leaders, SCALA helped build trust and buy-in from local leaders, while offering additional support to the cassava growers for production, processing and market access that are now leading to more far-reaching benefits including increased incomes for women. These include restoring soils and forest cover, building resilience to drought, supporting women’s incomes and land rights, and contributing to local food security.
In Colombia, when the government set out to translate its Change Management Plan for the Agriculture and Livestock sector into local implementation, SCALA stepped in to support the integration of traditional knowledge and local priorities into these efforts. SCALA worked with producer organizations, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, government and technical institutions to establish Four Community Climate Action Laboratories in the Páramos, creating space for exchange of knowledge, learning and joint action. A series of adaptation dialogues with Indigenous peoples and local communities helped identify and document 15 traditional agricultural practices and techniques, making it possible to integrate these practices into local adaptation processes.
In Colombia, SCALA supports the integration of traditional knowledge and local priorities into national agriculture strategies.
Photos: UNDP Colombia
One such traditional agriculture practice is the cultivation of the Guajiro bean by Wayúu communities in the arid La Guajira region. The crop is adapted to the area’s hot and dry conditions, while traditional seed selection and water-management practices have helped communities maintain food supplies through periods of drought and increasingly unpredictable rainfall. By connecting this local and Indigenous knowledge with climate adaptation efforts, the lesson is that innovation doesn’t always mean introducing something new. Often, it means recognizing the value of knowledge developed over generations and creating spaces for it to shape wider climate policy and planning.
In Cambodia, SCALA began working with the country six years ago to explore how cassava and cashew production in Stung Treng Province could become more climate-resilient and forest-positive. The programme brought together farmers, adaptation practitioners, researchers from the Royal University of Agriculture, different ministries, communities and the private sector. The value chain analysis that followed drew on more than 60 people across the chain, and the solutions came from the connections between them. Together, farmers and representatives from cooperatives, banks and government institutions highlighted practical production steps like cover crops and intercropping, the need to increase local processing capacities and strengthen the traceability of the value chains and how access to green loans is crucial to scale up these solutions.
In Cambodia, SCALA is exploring solutions to make cassava and cashew production more climate resilient.
Photos: UNDP Cambodia/Sreylen Hak
By bringing together all of these actors around their shared challenges, the process connected complementary knowledge and perspectives, linking what was happening on the ground with policy processes and investment opportunities, creating a path forward on the derisking policies and financial instruments needed to make these value chains more resilient and prevent further deforestation. The findings are now informing Cambodia’s Adaptation Investment Plan and efforts to connect climate-smart businesses with private sector investment.
Nourishing tomorrow
Climate adaptation in agrifood systems depends on connections: between national policy and local realities, scientific and traditional knowledge, producers and markets, and public and private institutions. And, in our case, between two UN agencies with separate mandates and areas of expertise but shared goals and principles.
We want all people to have access to safe, nutritious food. We want them to have secure livelihoods and social equity. And we want them to live in a healthy and resilient planet.
We believe these ambitions are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, through SCALA, we have evidence that points to how connecting people with divergent views and agendas can lead to innovative and transformative solutions that protect our food security and precious ecosystems.
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