Threats that climate change—a phenomenon marked by global warming and an increase in extreme weather events—pose to the world’s one billion food-insecure are well documented.

Desertification, rising sea levels, depleted freshwater sources, deadly natural disasters, and other disruptive events directly or indirectly caused by the changing climate inhibit smallholder farmers in developing countries from growing enough food for their families and communities to survive—let alone prosper.

IFPRI’s climate change researchers have identified adaptation and mitigation efforts that farmers—in Africa, Asia, and beyond—can use to overcome and ultimately lessen these challenges.

But despite the clear and perilous climate change-agriculture relationship and the existence of concrete solutions, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiators working toward a global climate change deal have only recently acknowledged the importance of integrating food security into a final document.

The insistence, however, by some developing country representatives that a treaty without agriculture is “no deal” ensures that the impact of climate change on small-scale farmers will be a prominent theme in the upcoming Bonn and Cancun rounds of global climate treaty negotiations.

In order to spark a global dialogue about the food security-climate change crisis, climate experts, scientists, policymakers, and farmers will gather in Nairobi on May 4 for the conference Building Food Security in the Face of Climate Change. Their overarching goal is to design an action plan that can help to inform climate negotiators as they iron out adaptation and mitigation mechanisms that acknowledge poor, rural farmers.

The joint Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) event will feature speeches by Pramod Aggarwal, a lead author at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Achim Steiner, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). IFPRI’s Gerald Nelson, a senior climate change researcher in the Environment and Production Technology Division, will also play a leading role.