Climate change, sustainable agriculture and food systems: The world after the Paris agreement

The increasing population, food consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are pushing our planet through a transformation never experienced before. The Paris Agreement (PA) has recognized the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and ending hunger, and the particular vulnerabilities of food production systems to the adverse impacts of climate change, and identified agriculture as a critical sector, not only impacted by climate change but also able to mitigate it. In the following chapter, we suggest different feasible options to address the challenges raised by the PA: make agriculture contributing to the net emissions reduction while guaranteeing food security. Some options embrace a number of actions aimed to manage the human demand-side drivers to make the food production and the food supply chain more virtuous, others are mitigation supply-side (land management policies) aimed to achieve more sustainable and resilient agricultural systems. To fully reach the target of limiting the temperature increase below the 1.5–2.0 °C target, a shift of our actual behavioral paradigm and perception of climate change is essential.