Policy Recommendations

These recommendations highlight that climate, nutrition, and food systems policies should be guided by human rights obligations and international law, emphasizing the principles of equity and justice. They stress the need for greater urgency and coherence across policies to address hunger.

1. Strengthen accountability to international law and the enforceability of the right to adequate food.

   • States need to uphold and expand their legal obligations to eliminate gender discrimination, ensure the right to food, and alleviate hunger, including during disasters and conflicts, based on the Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Food and related guidance.

   • States must formalize the right to food in concrete laws and regulations, accompanied by transparent monitoring and robust accountability mechanisms. Food and nutrition security analysis should include the perspectives and experiences of affected communities, and hunger early warning systems should be directly linked to prompt political action and automatic funding for relief. Citizens, civil society, and national human rights institutions must be supported so they can advocate for the right to food.

   • Governments, multilateral organizations, and civil society organizations must strengthen capacities and systems to document, investigate, and report the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Stakeholders with an influence on parties to conflicts need to promote compliance with human rights, humanitarian, and criminal law, and support judicial efforts against perpetrators. UN Resolution 2417 on the protection of civilians in armed conflict must be fully operationalized and rigorously implemented.

2. Promote gender-transformative approaches to food systems and climate policies and programs.

   • To formulate effective, context-sensitive policies and programs that avoid adverse effects, policymakers and practitioners must recognize how food systems and climate resilience are influenced by diverse needs and vulnerabilities and complex socioeconomic factors such as gendered power dynamics and divisions of labor.

   • All climate and food systems policy processes and initiatives must ensure the representation and leadership of women and marginalized groups and draw on their expertise in managing natural resources. Governments need to establish inclusive, participatory governance structures with adequate decision-making power and budgets at all levels, from local citizens’ councils to the global Committee on World Food Security.

   • Policymakers must integrate gender considerations into legal frameworks and policy design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. For example, they should update their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and national food systems pathways to focus on equity, inclusivity, and rights-based approaches. Recommended measures include gender budgeting and social and gender audits.

3. Make investments that integrate and promote gender, climate, and food justice.

   • Governments must redistribute public resources to redress structural inequalities and enable gender-equitable access. For example, public investments in care, education, health, and rural development should be used to address discriminatory norms and promote equitable distribution of labor within households and communities. Commitments to maternal, infant, and child health must be strengthened through, for example, the extension of the World Health Assembly targets and the upcoming Nutrition for Growth Summit.

   • Development partners and governments should harmonize policies across sectors and coordinate relevant ministries. For example, governments need to invest in and promote food systems that produce affordable, nutritious, climate-resilient foods, reduce women’s time poverty, improve their socioeconomic status, and increase their agency. Agricultural support should focus on climate mitigation and gender-transformative, locally led adaptation.

   • International financial institutions, governments, and creditors urgently need to address the worsening debt crisis and lack of fiscal space in low- and middle-income countries. Debt restructuring, debt relief, and credit enhancements must be linked to investments in realizing the right to food, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and fulfilling the Paris Agreement.

   • Essential responses to shocks and crises should not come at the expense of impactful long-term investments. Donor countries should make good on their commitments to increase development funding to at least 0.7 percent of GDP. The donor community should also provide climate support in the form of grants to empower affected communities, especially women, youth, and Indigenous peoples, to implement local climate actions. Within the recently created Loss and Damage Fund, a small-grant window with simplified procedures should be established for these groups.

Policy Recommendations in previous editions:

Policy Recommendations (2022)

These recommendations highlight the need to respond to current emergencies while also transforming food systems so they are more equitable, inclusive, sustainable, and resilient—and thus are able to avert future crises.

Policy Recommendations (2023)

These recommendations highlight the interest of youth in shaping their future as well as their right to do so. Generational and gender justice must underpin equitable, sustainable, and resilient food systems that fulfill the right to adequate food for current and future generations.

Policy Recommendations (2021)

Integrating a peace-building lens into the creation of resilient food systems and a food security lens into peace building can help advance both sustainable food and nutrition security and durable peace.

Policy Recommendations (2020)

To ensure the right to adequate and nutritious food for all and to end hunger by 2030, we must not only reshape our food systems to become fair, healthy, resilient, and environmentally friendly but also integrate them into a broader political effort to maximize the health of humans, animals, and our planet.