The Agriculture and Rural Development Day event was held at the University of Copenhagen, in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Saturday, 12 December 2009. The event took place in parallel with the United Nations Climate Change Conference, including the fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the fifth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP/MOP 5), held in Denmark from 7-18 December 2009.

The Agriculture and Rural Development Day was co-hosted by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security, the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development, and the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. The event was attended by over 350 participants, including representatives from governments, UN and international agencies, business, NGOs, academia and farmers.

The key objectives of the meeting were to build consensus on ways to fully incorporate agriculture into the post-Copenhagen climate agenda and to discuss strategies and actions needed to address climate change adaptation and mitigation in the agriculture sector. Participants heard two keynote presentations during the opening session in the morning, and also attended four parallel roundtables before lunch. In the afternoon, there was a presentation by the US Secretary of Agriculture, and an “ideas marketplace” to provide an informal opportunity for dialogue and information exchange. The closing plenary was held in the early evening, during which a synthesis from the roundtables and a summary of the day were presented, followed by the premier of the film feature “Hope in Climate Change.”

The results of the Agriculture and Rural Development Day will be presented, along with outcomes from Forest Day and the FAO Climate Change and Food Security event, at a COP 15 Side Event on Monday afternoon, 14 December, titled: “Beyond Copenhagen: Agriculture and Forestry are Part of the Solution. How can forestry and agriculture help to mitigate climate change and feed 9 billion people by 2050?”....More information