Editor's note: Decision Makers is a global platform for decision makers to share their insights on events shaping today's world. Nii Quaye-Kumah is the representative to China of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and head of the Regional South-South and Triangular Cooperation Center for Asia and the Pacific at IFAD. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

Every year on World Environment Day which falls on June 5, the world pauses to reflect on the state of our planet. This year's theme on climate action fits well into this moment of urgency.

To keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, we must halve annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. As that window narrows, there is a group of people whose voices are often absent from the headlines – the 3 billion people living in rural areas of developing countries, and the "first mile" of the supply chain – small-scale farmers who produce half of the world's food while standing on the frontlines of a crisis they did little to create.

At the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), climate action is not only about reducing emissions. It is also about ensuring that the most vulnerable people on earth – rural smallholders, women farmers, mountain communities – have the tools, knowledge and support to adapt, survive and ultimately thrive in a changing world. We can't end poverty, hunger, or inequality without resilient rural communities.

The 2026 Global Report on Food Crises found that 266 million people in 47 countries and regions faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025, representing nearly double the proportion of the analyzed population recorded a decade ago.

For smallholder farmers, climate change directly impacts their livelihood: From a disrupted planting season, a tea harvest lost to an unexpected frost, to a hillside community cut off by a landslide triggered by a storm that arrived without warning. These smallholders produce an estimated 70% of the food consumed in developing countries, yet only 0.8% of global climate finance reaches them.

IFAD is working to close that gap. Through its Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP) and its successor ASAP+, the largest fund dedicated to channeling climate finance to small-scale producers, IFAD aims to mobilize $500 million and benefit more than 10 million people, with a focus on the intersection of climate, conflict and fragility in some of the world's most vulnerable regions.

To further scale up its impact, IFAD has also surpassed the $1 billion mark in sustainable bond issuances since 2022, with 12 bonds issued across four currencies, enabling the Fund to reach millions more rural people with climate-resilient technologies, market access and financial services.

From a country perspective, China's updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), announced by President Xi Jinping in September 2025, sends an important signal to the world. China has committed to reducing economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7% to 10% from peak levels by 2035, while targeting a clean-energy share of over 30% in total energy consumption and aiming to establish a climate-adaptive society within the same timeframe.

These targets reflect a critical recognition that climate action must be embedded in the fabric of economic and rural development and not treated as a separate agenda. IFAD's partnership with China, spanning 46 years and 35 projects benefiting 4.65 million rural households, is built on precisely this understanding.

Two new IFAD-financed projects were launched in Hunan and Gansu provinces in 2025, with a combined investment of approximately $460 million from both the government and IFAD. The Hunan Specialized Forestry Industry Development Project was designed with climate at its core. Through an enterprise-led inclusive green growth model, it aims to increase the productive capacity and market access of 128,000 smallholder beneficiaries, while optimizing environmental sustainability, climate resilience and contributing directly to China's carbon neutrality goal.

Within the same province, the impact of IFAD's climate-smart investment is already visible in the fields. In Guzhang County, nestled deep in the Wuling Mountains of Hunan Province, climate adaptation has taken the form of a network of smart weather stations. Under the IFAD-supported Hunan Rural Revitalization Development Project, the county meteorological bureau has built and upgraded seven smart climate monitoring and early warning stations across key townships, transforming incomplete data into a real-time sensing network that monitors temperature, rainfall, wind direction and other critical variables.

In 2025 alone, the network issued 234 warnings in 26 rounds of hazardous weather, reaching over 450,000 people. The results are visible in the fields: Tea farmers from a local tea garden optimized their spring harvest schedule based on precise forecasts, lifting output by 10.2% year on year.

Across the countries where IFAD operates, smallholder farmers face structurally similar challenges encountered in Guzhang: Limited access to timely climate information, fragile infrastructure and less-equipped farming systems to confront the shocks of a warming planet. What makes the experience of Guzhang – and,  indeed more broadly, China's approach – distinctive is the systematic way it has invested in climate-smart infrastructure, integrated digital tools into rural services and built institutional capacity at the county and township level.

China's own development trajectory offers a lot to learn from. Having lifted around 800 million people out of extreme poverty over around four decades, China has demonstrated that sustained, targeted investment in rural communities, combining policy support, infrastructure, technology and institutional capacity, can produce some amazing results. The integration of climate-smart tools into IFAD-supported projects in Hunan, Gansu and Yunnan provinces is a powerful illustration of what that ambition looks like in practice.

On this occasion of World Environment Day, let us live on the theme of the celebration and to be "Inspired by Nature – For Climate – For Our Future." Against this background, IFAD calls on governments, development partners and the private sector to make smallholder climate adaptation a genuine priority – one that is not a rhetoric, but that which would be realized in resource allocation.

This means scaling investment in climate risk information systems and the requisite infrastructure in rural areas. It means supporting the exchange of proven, affordable technologies through South-South and Triangular Cooperation. And it means ensuring that climate finance reaches the farmers who need it most, with the speed and flexibility that their circumstances demand.

(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com. Follow @thouse_opinions on Twitter to discover the latest commentaries in the CGTN Opinion Section.)