BELÉM, BRAZIL – 10 NOVEMBER 2025 | On the first day of the COP30 climate conference, Professor Esther Duflo, 2019 Nobel laureate and co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), spoke at the launch of the COP30 Food Systems Transformation Science and Philanthropy Advisory Group (FST-SPAG) portfolio of investable, science-driven solutions designed to accelerate climate-smart agriculture, restore landscapes and advance food and nutrition security across Africa, Latin America and beyond.
Selected according to criteria developed by the advisory group's scientific members and published in technical brief last month, the portfolio aims to unlock adaptation and resilience at scale — with a shared commitment to equity, climate justice and locally-led innovation.
With a total value of USD 522M, the portfolio is intended to help mobilise investment by informing decision-making among philanthropies and other private sector actors looking to fund science-based projects for food systems transformation in the face of climate change.
Professor Duflo addressed a meeting convened by the COP30 FST-SPAG co-chairs – Embrapa, CGIAR and Community Jameel.
Thank you very much to the organisers, Community Jameel, Embrapa and CGIAR, for the invitation, for having me here, and for everyone involved in making this happen today: Congratulations, not only for the event, but of course, for the launch of the FST-SPAG.
Climate change is not about the environment, although it is partly about the environment. It's also a crisis of justice.
That's because the poorest people in the world, who contribute the least to global emissions suffer the most from its consequences in their livelihoods and in their lives.
Therefore adaptation is not charity, it's a moral imperative. It's basic fairness. It's also the only way to move forward.
And fairness is not just about making an effort, it's about succeeding and therefore investing in solutions that work, especially in the most vulnerable communities.
And we are very much falling short. The global adaptation finance gap is vast and it's growing.
Governments in low and middle income countries are eager to do something, but they have no money to do this effectively, and of course the current events suggest they might have less and less, instead of more and more.
In this circumstance, we must not only ensure that the budgets stay where they are, but also that every dollar spent on adaptation delivers impact.
And that means investing in solutions that are backed by rigorous evidence, and not just good intentions.
Enter FST-SPAG, that is launched today, at this COP.
FST-SPAG's pipeline will bring together 500 million in rigorously-tested, science-backed solutions: climate-resilient crops, sustainable inputs, digital tools, including livestock systems.
Those are not isolated innovations or interventions. They are designed to work together, complement one another, to address multiple dimensions in food systems transformation.
What makes this portfolio unique is not just the diversity of ideas but also the depth of evidence between each and every one of them.
Only a small subset of what could be done has rigorously been evaluated.
FST-SPAG is a coalition of funders committed to scaling what works.
There are solutions that we are confident can deliver impact when they are scaled up and when they are integrated in public systems.
In this sense, FST-SPAG is deeply aligned with the COP30 vision as articulated by President Corrêa do Lago, especially in the last letter, the eighth letter: It's a COP of implementation, and it's a COP of adaptation.
The pipeline reflects a cooperative, evidence-driven approach to adaptation one that turns proven ideas into scalable programmes that governments can own and sustain.
It is not accidental that the three partners who are founding partners of this effort – Community Jameel, CGIAR and Embrapa – are here together and have since been joined by many other colleagues.
Embrapa, of course, is storied in Brazil and around the world for being a very unique effort: state-funded, locally-grounded research in all of the agrizones of the country.
And recent research by my MIT colleagues has shown that it has contributed significantly to agricultural productivity and growth in the country and has a rate of return of $1 has brought in $13 in benefits to the country.
That is because the research was relevant to each zone and the best researchers were attracted to work here, and some of the innovations could be scaled up.
CGIAR, of course, is world-famous for its prompting of the Green Revolution, bringing agricultural technologies relevant to many countries in the world.
Community Jameel, Uzma [Sulaiman] already mentioned their involvement in many evidence bases. The one I am obviously the closest to and fondest of, a bit self-servingly, is J-PAL, which I happen to have the honour of founding with the support of Mr [Mohammed] Jameel, before Community Jameel even existed.
And the J-PAL model, which became, I think, fundamental in everything Community Jameel is doing and, I think, whose ethos found itself in the FST-SPAG as well, is evidence-to-scale.
Our motto at J-PAL that we started with, came up with, 20 years ago, with no training in communication, was "Translating research into action".
So in our work at J-PAL, what we've discovered is that the best approach to successful scaling is to apply a venture capital model for social impact.
With innovation in many, many attempts, many of which will fail, and then: stage one of piloting, and stage two of research at scale, and stage three of actually doing all of the legwork to get implementation at scale.
K-CAI is our vehicle for climate research.
But beyond that, once you have something that works, we have also learned – J-PAL is a little over 20 years old now and has already reached almost a billion people, not directly, but through the scaling up of solutions that work, so we have an experience or two – and we have discovered that it doesn't happen on its own.
That even a great idea that is super-effective, even an idea that has been modified such that it can be scaled up, may or may not scale up, depending on whether it finds a champion within government or not.
So for this reason, we created a catalyser, which we called the Innovation in Government Initiative, or IGI, which helps governments adapt and integrate proven solutions into public systems.
So, remarkably, what we do with IGI is to fund researchers not to do research – in fact, to stop doing research, but to scale up what works, which could be their idea or even someone else's idea, by working hand-in-hand with government.
We have a strong track-record in identifying these evidence-backed, investible solutions – in health, in livelihoods – and take it to scale through vehicles like IGI.
We do this by bringing researchers and governments together to make sure that these proven solutions are integrated into large-scale programmes.
Often, what this means is hiring someone and placing them in a ministry, so that they can make them themselves useful generally, but also kind of help translating the ideas.
We actually have relatively few of these food system innovations that have gone through this gauntlet.
So we have a true, very, very, very high hope – we are placing very, very high hope in FST-SPAG to do that.
Because there are already innovations that are kind of waiting at the gate, ready to scale. Some of them have already been scaled in some places but could be translated in others.
Let me give you a few examples that relate to climate and food security.
One is seasonal weather forecasting, which has already scaled in India. AI-powered monsoon forecasts are now more accurate than physical models. They are also, of course, much cheaper to run.
They have been, we have helped scale the transmission to about 9 million farmers in collaboration with the state government in Odisha, India.
This is essential for farmers to figure out when to plant, what to plant, or maybe to sit out the season.
In Niger, rainwater harvesting, half-moon – demi-lune in French – has helped restore degraded land and improve yields and a scale-up had started, has started, slowly, with the government of Niger.
In India, we've tested in West Bengal, the flood-tolerant seeds, which now are scaling farmer adoption of the seeds through programmes like farmer field days.
In Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil, payments for ecosystem services – so, a conditional cash transfer to encourage smallholders to protect their trees, supporting indigenous communities and low-income households to reduce deforestation and emissions – has also been found to be effective and is being scaled up.
What we've learned through these examples and others is that it takes a lot to scale.
We have partnerships with 30 governments and our policy teams work hand-in-hand with the implementers to do the work.
We have identified that it requires identifying champions.
Leveraging policy windows is highly customised. There is not, like, one solution that works for everything.
We draw on our network of more than a thousand researchers around the world, plus many, many of our own staff, 500 of our own staff, and many we hire on occasion, including in the ministries.
And in total, this is how we have managed to scale up half our projects to reach almost a billion people total, or about a million per project successfully scaled-up.
Today, we are all here to call for more investment in science to guide policy and in science to work hand-in-hand with policymakers.
As in Brazil, to do research that is actually relevant to the local context, as the Embrapa model showed, but also for policymakers to take on those lessons.
To take another example of Brazil, we've shown that when you go to talk to mayors at a mayors' conference and you discuss with them results, well, they go back to their municipalities and they are all raring to go and implementing these methods.
So there is actually a huge amount of demand for things to work. There are many solutions that are ready. The capital to scale them is often missing.
So today, we are excited to be here. We're excited to use this platform at COP to – along with the partners, the founding partners of FST-SPAG – to urge companies and philanthropies to join and fund what works.
We have to invest in evidence-based programmes that governments can own and can sustain. Thank you.