The Paris Agreement marked a major breakthrough in support for climate action from many parts of the business community, including from key actors in the food and beverage sector. But despite significant progress, much work remains both to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to support the millions of people already hit by climate change.

Climate change is a brutal reality confronting millions of the world’s most vulnerable people. Their need for financial support to adapt to climate extremes is urgent and rising. International support for adaptation falls well short of what is needed.

Up to 2.5 billion people depend on indigenous and community lands, which make up over 50 percent of the land on the planet; they legally own just one-fifth. The remaining five billion hectares remain unprotected and vulnerable to land grabs from more powerful entities like governments and corporations.

Millions of poor and vulnerable people face hunger and poverty this year and next because of record global temperatures, droughts and erratic rains in 2014 and 2015, compounded by the development of possibly the most powerful El Niño on record.

Negotiations towards a new climate deal to be agreed at the UN climate conference in Paris in December have included voluntary climate targets by countries around the world in the form of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).

Climate change is undermining the ability of African nations to feed themselves. Women smallholder producers are on the front line of dealing with the impacts, but are not first in line for international climate finance.

Millions of poor people in Southern Africa, Asia and Central America face hunger and poverty this year and next because of droughts and erratic rains as global temperatures reach new records, and because of the onset of a powerful El Niño – the climate phenomenon that develops in the tropical Pacific and brings extreme weather to several regions

The emerging economies Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Turkey – in short, the BRICSAMIT – have come to be considered the economic powerhouses of recent decades.

Fifteen years after the launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and a decade after G7 leaders gathered in Gleneagles to promise to ‘make poverty history’, the end of extreme poverty is within reach.

Smallholder farmers, and particularly women, are on the frontline in the fight against hunger and climate change in southern Africa. Unequal access to resources, poor access to finance and limited linkages to markets to sell their produce impose critical constraints, and food insecurity and poverty are the direct outcomes of this failure.