Mohamed A. Sultan

How do we ensure that we're improving productivity and production to meet food security, but doing so in a way that minimizes emissions?

Well, 11,000 farmers in Accra, in Ghana or around Accra, are working very closely with their environmental protection agency, and they're attempting to use a method called alternate wetting and drying.

This is a method that, only when conditions are suitable and applicable, allows them to naturally drain the water off the field.

In doing so, they are managing an incredibly scarce resource, that is water, but they're also managing production and productivity and limiting methane emissions.

That is good for the producers, it's good for consumers, it's good for food security, because ultimately, we will need more resilient and sustainable production systems

that also reward smallholder farmers.

And we can't stop there.

We absolutely need to continue to have multidisciplinary spaces in which we provide more solutions, more cost-effective solutions, less risky solutions to these farmers who are central to the systemic change that we want to see in food systems.

And listen, what I've described here is a series of projects and initiatives that essentially show a window into the nexus between climate, development and methane.

And it's certainly not a panacea, and they need scale and they need improvement, but what they do show

is progress that builds momentum that people can get behind because they can see the benefits.

And we will undoubtedly need that momentum, partly because to get to a high development and low-mess in the future, we will need systemic improvements.

And that's also why some of the things that African nations have been working towards requires a lot more support

particularly in ensuring that we're able to raise domestic resources and capital that allows us to self-fund climate and development in a way that increases agency and decision-making here on the continent.

Things like bringing together African financial institutions around the Africa Club, or addressing the incredibly high cost of capital that we face, or sovereign debt burdens.

Unlocking that capital is integral to moving methane action forward, because unfortunately, a lot of these methane emissions are going up.

globally, and much of it is also underreported.

And so there's really no getting around or away from the centrality of governance and accountability, of which we will need more of, first of all at home, because we need to manage our affairs better, but also globally, to ensure that we're understanding where these emissions are coming from and how we tackle them equitably for greater collective impact.

It's also the case that in this distributed, multipolar world, eventually we will probably need more

rather than less collaboration, particularly leaning into domestic capacity in a much more creatively and distributed way across geographies and across disciplines to support better scientific research and breakthroughs, to improve data measurement capacity across the globe and to get to more effective financing options.