Transforming global food systems for a warming world: climate-smart innovations, governance, and investment pathways

Abstract

Climate change is fundamentally reshaping the biophysical and socioeconomic foundations under which food is produced, processed, traded, and consumed. Simultaneously, the global agri-food system accelerates this crisis through greenhouse gas emissions, land use change, freshwater depletion, and biodiversity loss. This review examines climate-smart food systems (CSFS) as a food-system-wide extension of climate-smart agriculture rather than as a narrow farm-level label. Its contribution is threefold. First, it organizes climate impacts by risk-transmission mechanism across production, postharvest systems, trade, food environments, and diets. Second, it synthesizes responses as portfolios that connect technologies with governance, finance, and inclusion safeguards. Third, it proposes a monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) and decision-screening framework for prioritizing investment pathways under uncertainty. The evidence indicates that isolated technologies rarely deliver durable “triple-win” outcomes unless they are bundled with enabling services, rights protections, and learning-oriented monitoring. Quantitative evidence also shows that climate risks are already material across crops, livestock, and supply chains, while demand-side shifts and food-loss reduction can generate sizeable mitigation gains. The review therefore argues for a sequencing logic: diagnose dominant risks, prioritize no-regret enabling investments, bundle context-specific interventions, and track performance across productivity, resilience, emissions, ecosystem health, and equity. Key research gaps remain on bundled interventions, political-economy feasibility, and interoperable indicators that can guide scaling with integrity.