Climate change could sink up to 122 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030, mostly in South Asia and Africa, where small farmers would see their output plummet, the UN warned. In an annual report, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) warned that a worst-case scenario involving high-impact climate change would pound the communities that rely on agriculture for their livelihood.

• It called for a “broad-based transformation of food and agricultural systems” to adapt to a warmer world, and doubling down on support for the world’s 475 million smallholder farm families.
• Farming is both a driver of climate change, responsible for some 21 percent of global greenhouse gas production, and a victim, with crops adversely affected by drought and floods.
• Adopting “climate-smart” practices, like planting nitrogen-efficient and heat-tolerant crops, or finding better ways to conserve water, would reduce undernourishment for many millions,
• To weigh the effect of climate change, the FAO created predictive models based on either a low- or high-impact scenario, and compared them to a third in which climate change did not exist.
• In comparison, developed countries and the biggest developing countries spent more than $560 billion in 2015 supporting the farming industry, the FAO said in its report.
• The UN agency also highlighted agricultural innovations that could help the industry reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.