Combating Climate Change for Sustainable Food Security in Africa and Asia: Role of Climate Finance, Climate Policies, Adaptive Capacity, and Governance

Abstract

The United Nations “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” agenda 2030, particularly “SDGs 2.1 and 13,” emphasizes ensuring food security while mitigating climate risks through targeted climate actions. However, with the current global climate change trends and policies to eradicate hunger, achieving food security and climate goals is highly unlikely, especially in Africa and Asia, which are highly susceptible to climate change. These regions cumulatively account for 783 million severely food insecure people, needing tailored climate actions to achieve SDGs 2.1 and 13. Thus, this study investigates the simultaneous role of climate finance (CF), climate policies (CP), adaptive capacity (AC), and government readiness (GR) in addressing climate change (CC) and ensuring food security (FS) across 36 countries (24 in Africa and 12 in Asia) over the period 2000–2022. This study also advances prior research by constructing and using multidimensional food security and climate change indexes based on FAO and IPCC guidelines, providing a more comprehensive assessment. The study uses robust estimation techniques, including 2SLS, 3SLS, and the method of moments quantile regression, to obtain robust estimates while addressing methodological challenges such as endogeneity. The empirical estimates reveal an inverse U-shaped impact on FS and a U-shaped impact on CC, indicating that the current CF allocations are insufficient. The estimated CF requirement is USD 168.17 million/year for Africa and USD 176.80 million/year for Asia to simultaneously meet SDGs 2.1 and 13. The empirical estimates further delineate that while AC and CP show only marginal impacts, governance readiness’s direct and moderating role with CF and AC significantly abates climate change and improves food security. Thus, the policy suggestions include boosting domestic climate finance by encouraging private players, strengthening adaptive capacity, and implementing proactive climate policies by adopting a decentralized governance system to accelerate SDG progress in Africa and Asia.