Diane Hendrick of QUNO Geneva and Alexandra Trzeciak-Duval, former Head of the Policy Division in OECD’s Directorate for Development Co-operation, co-moderated an e-discussion on Mainstreaming Food Security into Peacebuilding Processes. You can read contributions to the e-discussion at http://www.fao.org/fsnforum/protracted-crises.

In March, QUNO organized a side event at the Human Rights Council on “Procedural Rights and the Environment: Preventing conflict around water, land and food". Procedural rights include the right to information, public participation in decision-making and right to remedy and complement substantive rights such as the right to life or the right to food. Jonathan Woolley of QUNO chaired the event and the Permanent Representatives of Ethiopia and Chile to the UN in Geneva spoke on existing and planned legal frameworks relating to the environment in Africa and Latin America, respectively.

On 23 September, world leaders met in New York for the UN Climate Summit to highlight the urgency of acting on anthropogenic climate change. Civil society also played a vital role in this process, as demonstrated by the momentous People’s Climate March.

In addition to joining the march and hosting two intimate "quiet conversation" lunches with local faith communities, civil society actors and policymakers, the QUNO Human Impacts of Climate Change programme  released two publications during this critical time.

The Geneva Climate Change Concertation Group (GeCCco), the Geneva Interfaith Forum on Climate Change and Human Rights (GIF), QUNO and other NGOs concerned about the impact of climate change on human rights, co-hosted CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN RIGHTS: THE WAY FORWARD IN THE HRC, a side event to the 28th session of the Human Rights Council. The side event was held on Friday, 6 March, from 1-3pm in Room XXVII at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. 

Agriculture is a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change, and in turn climate change threatens the viability of food production around the world. The spread of capital- and technology-intensive 'industrial' agriculture in the modern era has been accompanied by an erosion of on-farm genetic diversity, a loss of local knowledge, and the abandonment of traditional farming practices. This undermines our capacity to
adapt to already-changing climatic conditions.

In this video, excerpted from a longer film shown at the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) World Plenary Meeting held in Peru in January 2016, Lindsey Fielder Cook discusses the work of our Human Impacts of Climate Change programme.