School feeding programs, the largest social safety net in the world, provide a unique opportunity to address multiple climate, nutrition, and food system challenges. These programs are increasingly recognized as a cross-cutting platform for interventions that can be delivered at scale, offering multiple benefits for both nourishing people and the planet. Home-grown school feeding (HGSF) approaches, where school provisions link to local food production and farmers, provide an important framework for mainstreaming climate-resilient agriculture, food production, and innovation. They also facilitate scaling climate action to strengthen programming approaches that enable cross-cutting action to transform nutrition while contributing to achieving global climate, food, and biodiversity goals. The need for more climate change-responsive approaches to school feeding and identifying ways for school food procurement and menus to emphasize more climate-resilient foods make HGSF platforms a strategic entry point for a stronger climate-resilience component in school feeding. Such actions also change norms around school food, transform food choices, and build consumer demand for culturally appropriate, climate-resilient foods. 

While there is some evidence that such approaches enhance farmer incomes or improve food production, our understanding of how HGSF approaches can contribute to more climate-resilient food production and consumption remains limited. This event seeks to address this gap by bringing together key collaborating partners working on climate-resilient school feeding, including those involved in the recent School Meals Coalition White Paper on ‘School Meals and Food Systems’ launched at COP28, the Initiative on Climate Action and Nutrition (I-CAN) launched at COP27, and CGIAR partners and countries. The event presents a brief analysis of processes, including entry points for driving climate-resilient agriculture during procurement, menu development, and school and community gardens as pathways to more climate-resilient food production, while examining challenges related to indicators and metric gaps, barriers, and trade-offs.