Diversification and social safety nets as double wins for climate resilience and nutrition security: Opportunities from NAPs to the Global Goal on Adaptation
Earlier this month, the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) Expo 2025 took place in Lusaka, Zambia, the largest gathering convened under the UNFCCC on climate adaptation. This year’s Expo highlighted technology and innovation, finance, indigenous knowledge, and nature-based solutions as key pathways to resilience. Yet, despite food systems being central to both climate adaptation and human well-being, nutrition was almost absent from the conversation.
The only dedicated session on nutrition and food systems was co-hosted and carried out by Clim-Eat and GIZ, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation & Development (BMZ) and the European Union (EU). Titled “Pathways to Climate-Resilient and Nutrition-Secure Food Systems: Lessons on Diversification and Safety Nets for Adaptation,” the session emphasized the importance of integrating nutrition into climate policy frameworks like the NAPs.
Why climate and nutrition should be addressed together
Climate change undermines nutrition and food systems in multiple ways: from reducing agricultural productivity and food availability through increasingly erratic rainfall patterns, to compromising diet quality through declining nutrient density (Zhu et al., 2018). Food production and output are affected by climate change in terms of both quantity and quality, with direct implications for nutrition.
At the same time, food systems themselves are a main driver of climate change: responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, land use change and degradation, and the depletion of natural resources.
This bidirectional relationship results in negative feedback loops, but it also creates opportunities for strategies to support climate adaptation and advance nutrition outcomes simultaneously—addressing different sides of the same coin.
A 2023 I-CAN Baseline Assessment reported that climate policy commitments rarely consider nutrition, and that nutrition commitments often do not include climate considerations. This lack of climate-nutrition integration is a barrier to joint action, and cross-learning and information sharing are important for overcoming this (Campbell et al., 2024).
For food systems to be more sustainable and resilient, nutrition must be more fully integrated into agriculture and climate policies. Without explicit attention to nutrition outcomes, adaptation pathways may appear technically sound but remain socially incomplete, limiting their effectiveness for human well-being.
NAPs provide a strategic entry point for such integrated approaches. By building resilience in food systems, mainstream adaptation measures, such as diversification and social protection schemes, can be tailored to include both climate resilience and nutrition outcomes.
Key messages from the session
The session at the NAP Expo brought together diverse perspectives within climate, agriculture and nutrition to explore how food systems can be both climate-resilient and nutrition-secure. Highlighting that nutrition and climate resilience are inextricably linked through food systems, the following main takeaways and themes emerged:
Diversifying agricultural production and output—including through agroforestry, intercropping, crop rotation, and crop–livestock integration, particularly with indigenous and climate-adapted crops—strengthens soil health, improves yield stability, and reduces the risk of crop failure. It also supports more diverse diets and better nutrition outcomes.
Programmes ranging from climate risk insurance to school feeding and public procurement schemes can deliver both climate and nutrition benefits. For example, sourcing school meals locally from smallholders improves diet quality for children, stabilises markets, and encourages diversified production.
Crops such as millets and cow peas are both nutritious and climate-adapted to local environments, performing well in droughts, but their consumption is decreasing – due to stigma associating them with poverty. This association with low economic status needs to be decoupled before being able to promote increasing production of such foods.
Tackling issues such as teenage pregnancies is important for breaking intergenerational cycles of malnutrition and poverty, which increase vulnerability to climate change risks. For example in Zambia, where half of women under 20 have begun childbearing, adolescent pregnancies fuel an intergenerational cycle of malnutrition. Strengthening access to family planning is therefore essential to ensure that climate adaptation is inclusive, gender-responsive, and protects the nutrition and wellbeing of the most vulnerable.
It is important to note that these challenges are not gender-neutral. Women, who often play central roles in household food decisions, face disproportionate risks due to unequal access to resources, decision-making power, and adequate nutrition. Ensuring that adaptation measures are gender-responsive is therefore critical for equitable climate and nutrition outcomes.
Stakeholders at the session agreed that the evidence base is already strong, but emphasized the urgency of scaling efforts to deliver real impact.
Moving forward: Linking to the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA)
Clim-Eat, together with partners, has advanced this agenda through the NAP Expo and an earlier “Think-Table” on meaningful indicators for national policy on climate and nutrition in December 2024, emphasising the need for a small, actionable set of nutrition–climate indicators applicable across contexts.
A key opportunity is integrating these indicators into policy frameworks such as the NAPs. The Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) provides entry points for embedding climate-nutrition considerations into national and international processes. These discussions align with the broader objectives of the GGA under Article 7 of the Paris Agreement, which aims to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate change. Countries are currently working under the UAE–Belém work programme to finalise a consolidated list of GGA indicators, to be agreed at COP30 in November 2025.
However, nutrition is largely absent from this list, with the only proposed nutrition-related indicator being the Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W).* Defined by the FAO as “a yes/no indicator of whether or not women of reproductive age (aged 15 to 49 years) have consumed at least five out of ten defined food groups in the previous 24 hours,” it assesses dietary diversity with the assumption that the higher the MDD-W, the higher the proportion and change that women in the population are consuming micronutrient adequate diets, with indications on the rest of the population. While this inclusion is welcome, it highlights a gap in how food and nutrition security are reflected in global adaptation frameworks.
*Update: as of 11/09/2025, the MDD-W indicator is no longer being considered for the GGA. This exclusion unfortunately represents another missed opportunity for advancing the climate-nutrition nexus.
Without nutrition security built into food systems policies, resilience remains incomplete. Achieving this requires bridging institutional silos, ensuring gender-responsive approaches, and adopting measurement frameworks that capture the deeply connected climate-nutrition nexus for advancement in both areas.
Disclaimer: This blog and event are part of the Nutrition-Climate Game-Changers project. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation & Development (BMZ) and the European Union (EU). It is being carried out by Clim-Eat and implemented with support of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the BMZ, the EU or GIZ.
