Recommendations and policy implications

• Across actors and contexts, improving nutrition outcomes under climate change depends less on defining new priorities than on changing how action is organised and supported. Fragmented governance, short‑term financing and weak alignment between commitments and implementation continue to limit delivery, especially during shocks.
• The most progress is made when food systems, health systems, climate policy and social protection are planned and delivered together. The recommendations in this chapter prioritise strengthening integration, resilience, equity and accountability as core conditions for impact, rather than stand‑alone interventions.

If you would like to know more about any of the terms used in this chapter, you can visit the report glossary.

This chapter draws on the evidence reviewed in this report to identify priority areas for action to improve delivery of integrated food–health–climate outcomes. The recommendations are grouped by actor type, recognising that implementation depends on coordinated roles across government, donors, global platforms, civil society and the private sector, and are aligned with the four enablers: leadership and governance; financing; operational capacity; and research, monitoring and data.

These recommendations are offered as considerations informed by the report’s findings rather than as a universal prescription. Many governments and partners may already be pursuing some or all these directions, and the relevance and sequencing of specific actions will depend on national and subnational contexts, including existing policy frameworks, institutional capacity, fiscal conditions and the nature of the shocks and stressors each setting faces. Where action is already underway, the recommendations may help identify areas for deepening integration or strengthening accountability and/or assess existing synergies versus trade-offs; where it is not, they may serve as a starting point for dialogue among the actors involved.

Several of the recommendations below build on priorities identified through the N4G Paris 2025 thematic working groups and earlier commitment processes, including on climate-smart agriculture, environment regulation, subsidy reform and data systems for decision-making. Where this is the case, the report’s contribution is not to restate these priorities but to identify, based on the evidence reviewed, why progress against different recommendations has been limited and what may be needed to overcome persistent barriers. In particular, the analyses in Chapters 5 and 6 point to three structural constraints that cut across multiple recommendation areas: institutional fragmentation that prevents cross-sector mandates from translating into joint delivery; financing architectures that favour short-term, procedurally defined projects over the longer-term systemic reforms that transformation requires; and weak alignment between global commitments and national implementation instruments, particularly NDCs and NAPs, where nutrition remains marginal.

At the same time, several recommendations reflect priorities that emerge specifically from this report’s analysis and are not prominently featured in existing commitment frameworks. These include the integration of food and health system actions as a condition for effective resilience (Chapter 6), the distinction between procedural and substantive accountability as a governance requirement (Chapter 5), the need to address health system readiness alongside food systems transformation (Chapter 7), and the finding that gender integration in nutrition commitments remains shallow and narrowly framed despite policy recognition of women’s central role (Chapter 6). These areas represent gaps in the current commitment architecture that future commitment makers can address.

• Strengthen cross-sector governance and deliver integrated food–health–climate action. Cross-sector governance can be strengthened by establishing joint mandates across agriculture/food, health, social protection and climate ministries, with tailored implementation plans, and shared and aligned indicators and monitoring to ensure synergies and trade-off management. Public action can be directed towards healthier food environments – more affordable nutrient-dense foods, greater availability and uptake of diverse plant-based foods, focusing on supporting vulnerable population subgroups and less exposure to high-sugar and ultra-processed products – while supporting context-appropriate reductions in high-emissions animal-source foods where consumption is excessive. Link these actions to routine health services and food-for-health delivery platforms, including counselling, supplementation, fortification and the provision or prescription of nutritious foods for vulnerable groups. Embed nutrition actions and indicators within NDCs/NAPs and health plans (including universal health coverage).
• Implement climate-smart agriculture and post-harvest action as an integrated delivery package. Support diversified production to reduce climate risk and expand the supply of nutrient-dense plant-based foods, including legumes, fruits, vegetables and other locally appropriate crops. Invest in infrastructure and supply chain to ensure storage, handling, processing and transport mechanisms that protect perishable foods during heat and disruption. Apply safeguards so productivity and efficiency programmes reduce emissions and resource use without driving expansion into water-stressed or biodiversity-sensitive areas.
• Institutionalise shock response packages across food and health delivery platforms. Establishing in advance the triggers, roles and decision authority for responding to climate shocks can help ensure essential services continue without delay for responding to climate shocks. Pre-positioning key inputs (cash/food resources, nutrition supplies, essential medicines) in high-risk areas, supported by a coordination mechanism empowered to reallocate staff, budgets and supplies across sectors, can improve response times. Use contingency delivery modalities when routine channels are disrupted (mobile/outreach services, temporary distribution points, digital transfers). Budget and procurement rules should allow rapid scale-up while also remaining flexible and adaptable to different contexts and scenarios.
• Embed equity and gender in eligibility, benefit design and access across food and health systems. Design food, health and social protection measures to reach women and vulnerable groups. Addressing barriers linked to income, time and mobility will be critical. Concrete actions include securing women’s land rights, targeting extension to women farmers, designing accessible credit and insurance, reducing time poverty through infrastructure investments, ensuring transfers reach women directly and adapting health service delivery. Sex-disaggregated and vulnerability-disaggregated monitoring will be critical to assess reach, equity and whether interventions are changing dietary quality across groups.

• Adopt a single integrated results framework and indicator set and use it to assess ability to deliver over time. Track whether commitments have secured financing, cross-portfolio governance, delivery capacity at scale, outcome-level data systems and resilience provisions that maintain services during shocks.
• Build flexible monitoring that supports course correction and longer-term delivery. Nutrition outcomes respond slowly and can deteriorate quickly under repeated shocks, so short funding cycles and fixed log frames incentivise narrow, short-term outputs over sustained coverage and dietary quality. Multi-year commitments with built-in reprogramming space, routine learning reviews and nutrition outcome tracking can help trigger course correction as contextual conditions change or unexpected trade-offs emerge.
• Fund shock-ready delivery packages with flexible finance. Pre-positioned resources, triggers for activation and rapid scaling mechanisms to improve continuity across health and food systems during climate shocks.
• Promote financing and interventions that integrate equity and nutrition from the beginning. Embed nutrition within medium-term expenditure frameworks, repurpose agricultural subsidies towards diverse nutrient-dense foods, use fiscal measures to address health and environmental externalities, access climate finance for nutrition actions and support financing flexibility for rapid scaling during shocks.
• Make inclusion measurable in funded programmes. Sex- and vulnerability-disaggregated monitoring and minimum standards for access and participation can help ensure that funded programmes reach those most at risk, with corrective action when gaps persist.
• Fund more inter- and trans-disciplinary research, which would both help reveal interconnections and possible trade-offs across domains (e.g. health and food systems) and ensure more informed evidence-based interventions, while also considering the different visions, preferences and priorities of the many stakeholders involved in the transformation of both health and food systems.
• Recognise current constraints in the donor landscape and invest in financing diversification. In a period of contracting nutrition-relevant official development assistance, support domestic resource mobilisation, stronger public financial management and national financing systems for integrated food–health delivery so that implementation is not wholly dependent upon external funding. Where possible, use concessional finance and technical support to help countries build durable budget lines, procurement systems and shock-responsive financing mechanisms.

• Adopt a robust integrated framework and use recommended indicators to monitor progress, updating accountability assessments (e.g. NAF) with new research and evidence. Mechanisms remain dynamic when frameworks clarify which systems are engaged, which enablers are required, which outcomes are targeted and which trade-offs must be managed.
• Address indicator misalignment through framework harmonisation and capacity development. Without appropriate indicators, commitments become difficult to monitor and progress cannot be assessed. Global platforms and accountability bodies should therefore strive towards being dynamic and support regular harmonisation between multiple existing nutrition, food systems, health, climate and financing monitoring systems. They should also work towards reducing reporting burdens and duplication of efforts, and improve comparability. Monitoring indicators will need to be periodically readjusted as new conditions and gaps emerge.
• Evolve accountability from procedural compliance to substantive integration. Assess whether commitments specify secured financing, whether governance structures coordinate implementation across portfolios, whether operational capacity is adequate to deliver at scale, whether data systems track outcomes and whether resilience provisions maintain delivery during shocks. Expand frameworks to support learning and adaptation alongside monitoring.
• Strengthen cross-sector governance for ability to deliver as a commitment quality requirement. Commitments can be strengthened by specifying responsible agencies, funding sources, delivery mechanisms and minimum data for tracking implementation and trade-offs, reinforcing that deliverability depends on how effectively food, health, climate and financing systems are brought together.

• Strengthen participatory governance and community-based platforms. When planning and allocating resources, including formal space for collective organisations such as women-led groups, producer organisations and other community-based associations strengthens equity and effectiveness by reflecting local realities and climate risks. Trust, accessibility and cultural relevance shape uptake in both food and health systems.
• Embed equity and gender in eligibility, benefit design and access across food and health systems. Address barriers linked to income, time and mobility. Link community platforms to both systems to support extension, counselling, service uptake and mutual support during shocks.
• Use accountability systems as platforms for learning and course correction. Use the integrated framework and recommended indicators to make implementation gaps visible and to guide necessary iterative changes in the case of shocks or unexpected trade-offs.

• Improve nutrition performance of the private sector. Key mechanisms include accountability measures as well as improved incentives and regulations. The overall rules of the market within which actors (businesses, governments, investors, consumers) are working need to change. This requires coordinated action across all actors to ensure that nutritious food is more available, affordable, desirable and accessible. Markets will change when governments, international institutions, investors and businesses leverage the full range of private-sector tools, innovations and financial instruments, redirecting these such that they help achieve access to nutritious foods for healthier diets and better nutrition. The guiding principles for private-sector engagement were agreed by dozens of actors at the N4G Paris 2025 Summit in the Paris Declaration on Business and Nutrition 2030.
• Develop and apply clear rules and guiding principles for transparent and accountable private-sector engagement. Governments, UN agencies and accountability bodies can advance this by establishing nutrition and emissions disclosure requirements, conflict-of-interest standards, transparency regarding participation and funding, limits on industry roles in public decision-making where risks are high and independent verification of compliance. These measures can support the alignment of corporate food portfolios with sustainable healthy dietary goals, with transparent reporting on nutrition and emissions impacts.
• Support small- and medium-sized private-sector food systems actors that produce nutritious, healthy and safe foods. Invest in climate-resilient, nutrition-sensitive (perishable and nonperishable healthy foods) supply chains, particularly post-harvest infrastructure in low-income settings. Governments can enable this through tax incentives, dedicated grants or concessional loans, public procurement and regulatory support that lowers entry barriers for small- and medium-sized enterprises producing nutritious foods. Financing mechanisms will be more attractive where they reduce transaction costs, provide blended risk sharing and use clear eligibility and reporting standards.