Developing policies to foster inclusive rural transformation processes requires better evidence on how climate change is affecting the livelihoods and economic behaviours of vulnerable rural people, including women, youths and people living in poverty. In particular, there is little comparative, multi-country and multi-region evidence to understand how exposure to weather shocks and climate change affects the drivers of rural transformation and adaptive actions across different segments of rural societies and in different agro-ecological contexts. This evidence is essential because, while climate risk and adaptive actions are context specific and require local solutions, global evidence is important for identifying shared vulnerabilities and priority actions for scaling up effective responses. This report assembles an impressive set of data from 24 low- and middle-income countries in five world regions to measure the effects of climate change on rural women, youths and people living in poverty. It analyses socioeconomic data collected from 109 341 rural households (representing over 950 million rural people) in these 24 countries. These data are combined in both space and time with 70 years of georeferenced data on daily precipitation and temperatures. The data enable us to disentangle how different types of climate stressors affect people’s on-farm, off-farm and total incomes, labour allocations and adaptive actions, depending on their wealth, gender and age characteristics.

The United Nations General Assembly declared 2023 the International Year of Millets (IYM 2023). Millets’ diversity and ability to thrive on arid lands with minimal inputs make them a valuable contribution to healthy diets and nutrition in many countries. Each millet variety contributes different essential nutrients. They are an ideal solution for countries to increase self-sufficiency and transform their food system towards increased resilience. This recipe book is a legacy of the IYM 2023 and aims to raise awareness of the diversity of millets and to promote their consumption by sharing enticing recipes embracing different regions, tastes, cuisines, cooking skills and the versatility of millets. The recipes selected for this book were collected through the Global Chefs’ Challenge, which called on chefs and hobby cooks to explore cooking with millets and share photos and videos of their favouirite millets-based dish.

Agrifood systems generate significant benefits to society, including the food that nourishes us and jobs and livelihoods for over a billion people. However, their negative impacts due to unsustainable business-as-usual activities and practices are contributing to climate change, natural resource degradation and the unaffordability of healthy diets. Addressing these negative impacts is challenging, because people, businesses, governments and other stakeholders lack a complete picture of how their activities affect economic, social and environmental sustainability when they make decisions on a day-to-day basis.The State of Food and Agriculture 2023 looks into the true cost of food for sustainable agrifood systems. The report introduces the concept of hidden environmental, health and social costs and benefits of agrifood systems and proposes an approach – true cost accounting (TCA) – to assess them. To operationalize the TCA approach, the report proposes a two-phase assessment process, first relying on national-level TCA assessments to raise awareness and then moving towards in-depth and targeted evaluations to prioritize solutions and guide transformative actions. It provides a first attempt at national-level assessments for 154 countries, suggesting that global hidden costs from agrifood systems amount to at least to 10 trillion 2020 PPP dollars. The estimates indicate that low-income countries bear the highest burden of the hidden costs of agrifood systems relative to national income. Despite the preliminary nature of these estimates, the analysis reveals the urgent need to factor hidden costs into decision-making for the transformation of agrifood systems. Innovations in research and data, alongside investments in data collection and capacity building, are needed to scale the application of TCA, especially in low- and middle-income countries, so that it can become a viable tool to inform decision- and policymaking in a transparent and consistent way.

Over more than three-quarters of a century, FAO’s work on forest product statistics has made the Organization the recognized authority for data fundamental to what we now call the global bioeconomy. Forest product data are essential in monitoring impact and innovation in the global wood industry; responding to climate change by calculating carbon emissions; and developing equitable policies that uphold ecosystem services and forest values for our communities. Simply put, forest products – and the data that narrate them – underpin our sustainable future. Unless we understand and adequately measure how forest products are produced and traded, we cannot build the transparent, dynamic bioeconomy needed for the world to prosper.