When world leaders gathered in Belém for COP30 to sign the Belém Declaration on Hunger, Poverty and People-Centred Climate Action, they placed humanity at the heart of the climate agenda. The declaration recognises that climate change is deepening hunger and poverty, threatening livelihoods, and eroding hard-won progress on global development.
But the path to a sustainable future is not straightforward. To meet both planetary and human needs, societies must navigate difficult trade-offs. Success will depend on how effectively science can inform policy, innovation, and local action.
An analysis of FSTA-indexed literature from 2025 focused on the themes of climate change, food security, poverty, and smallholder farmers shows that the research community is actively engaging with these intertwined challenges.
This analysis draws on descriptors — controlled index terms from the FSTA Thesaurus — which are assigned by expert indexers to each piece of research. These descriptors capture the key scientific themes, disciplines, and concepts within every record, providing a structured view of the knowledge landscape. By analysing their frequency and relationships, we can see where global research attention is concentrated and where important gaps remain.
The data reveals a policy- and governance-driven focus across climate and food-system research, showing how science is engaging with the structures of power, economics, and environmental management that shape hunger and poverty:
> Policy and power take centre stage. Economics (87.6%) and Food Policy (80.2%) are the most frequent descriptors, showing that research is heavily oriented toward governance, regulation, and market mechanisms — often aiming to influence policymaking rather than directly studying household or community outcomes.
> Environment as essential context. Climate/Climate Change (74%), Ecology (78%), and Sustainability (36%) remain strong, reflecting an integrated systems approach that situates social and economic questions within environmental limits.
> Nutrition and health emerging as key outcomes. Descriptors such as Nutrition (15%) and Public Health (11%) highlight a growing awareness that food security must also address diet quality and wellbeing, even if these remain secondary themes.
> Global South leadership. Nearly one in five papers reference Africa (19.8%) or Asia (16.8%), showing that research increasingly focuses on the regions most affected by hunger and climate vulnerability, aligning with the equity goals of the COP30 Declaration.
> Evidence synthesis over implementation. Frequent modelling and review studies point to a robust analytical base but underscore the need for more intervention-level evidence that tests how specific policies and innovations improve real-world diets, incomes, and resilience.
All figures represent proportions of January - October 2025 records indexed in FSTA containing the given descriptors. Find out more about the power of the FSTA Thesaurus
Efforts to transform food systems expose a central tension between planetary health and human livelihoods.
Take palm oil, for example. It is one of the most efficient vegetable oils by yield per hectare, yet a major driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss. At the same time, it serves as a vital cash crop for millions of smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Efforts to eliminate palm oil from supply chains, while environmentally motivated, can inadvertently jeopardise the incomes of those least equipped to absorb the loss.
The same dilemma appears across many food commodities. Cocoa and coffee underpin rural economies but contribute to land-use change. Livestock provide protein and livelihoods while producing methane and driving deforestation. Rice sustains billions of people yet generates significant greenhouse gas emissions and requires huge water resources.
True sustainability, therefore, cannot be achieved through simple substitution or bans. It demands inclusive transition models, strategies that reduce environmental harm while protecting livelihoods and access to nutrition. Research into sustainable certification schemes, diversification incentives, and equitable value chains is starting to bridge this divide, though FSTA data show these studies still make up a small proportion of the literature.
The Belém Declaration commits governments to measurable goals on resilience, social protection, and food security. To make these commitments meaningful, decision-makers need more than awareness. They need evidence of what works.
Important research questions remain underexplored:
How do social protection schemes like cash transfers, crop insurance, or food subsidies affect dietary diversity and household resilience?
What market interventions best protect smallholder incomes under climate stress?
Which low-cost technologies — from solar drying and storage to fortification — most effectively connect adaptation with nutrition and income gains?
These are precisely the intersections that FSTA’s coverage and thesaurus make visible. By connecting literature across disciplines, from agronomy and food technology to nutrition, economics, and policy, FSTA provides the means to explore the full food–climate–poverty nexus and support evidence-based solutions.
IFIS is proud to participate in the UN Research4Life programme, which provides free or low-cost access to scientific databases, including FSTA, for institutions in low- and middle-income countries. This initiative ensures that researchers, educators, and NGOs in the regions most affected by hunger and climate change can access high-quality, peer-reviewed evidence.
The Belém Declaration’s commitment to “people-centred” action applies as much to knowledge access as it does to policy. Equitable discovery, supported by tools like FSTA, helps empower local researchers and practitioners to tailor global science to local needs. In this way, information equity becomes climate equity.
The 2025 research landscape shows encouraging progress: the global conversation on climate and food security is securely anchored in policy, economics, and people-centred perspectives. Yet it also reveals what’s missing: detailed, outcome-focused studies that link climate adaptation to tangible improvements in diet, income, and wellbeing.
As the world pursues the goals of the Belém Declaration, knowledge infrastructure will be as vital as finance or technology. Access to information plays a quiet but essential role in ensuring that climate action is both evidence-based and equitable.
Sustainability cannot come at the expense of livelihoods, and poverty reduction cannot ignore planetary limits. The real measure of progress will be how well we learn to serve both people and planet through science that informs, includes, and empowers.
Photo by Dominik Martin on Unsplash