By: Ore Koren and Gustavo Torrens
Climate change poses significant challenges to food security. Traditional climate policies have focused primarily on global mitigation efforts, emphasizing the reduction of carbon emissions. However, these strategies often encounter collective action problems and fall short of achieving their targets. This Article explores how local adaptation projects, which aim to enhance resilience to climate change, can also contribute to global mitigation efforts. By incorporating a model that evaluates the externalities of local adaptation projects on global mitigation, the study finds that investing in local adaptation not only improves food security but also enhances global mitigation efforts more effectively than direct global interventions. The model suggests that prioritizing local projects with significant mitigation externalities can be a more efficient strategy for donors. This Article provides examples of efficient adaptation techniques, including the use of resilient crops, efficient irrigation technologies, and low global warming potential refrigeration options. These findings advocate for a “glocal” approach, where local solutions are designed with global impacts in mind, thereby addressing the collective action problems at both levels and offering a sustainable path to mitigate climate change’s effects on food security.