The Ikea Foundation, the charitable arm of the family-owned group, would invest €400m by 2020 in supporting families and communities in nations vulnerable to impacts of climate change such as floods, droughts and desertification.
The combined miseries of coastal flooding, desertification, species loss, agricultural dislocation and disease migration are almost too much to imagine.
It is also linked to development because some of the most vulnerable countries are very poor, for example Sahelian states threatened by desertification and small island states affected by rising sea levels and ocean acidification.
It now faces desertification, literal and figurative.This month Nigeria's army launched its most determined effort yet to crush Boko Haram, a terror group whose campaign to create an Islamic state in the religiously mixed country has led to the deaths of about 3,000 people in the past four years.
In arid areas trees may even aggravate desertification by depleting groundwater and killing grasses that bind the soil.Most of the mega-scheme's critics think that with the right plants and methods, it could succeed.
But the impact would be negative on much of southern Europe, which would suffer severe water shortages, crop failures and maybe even desertification.
Nigeria has failed to plan for how to stem the dreadful pollution in its oil-producing Delta region or to prevent desertification tearing at the fabric of its dry Muslim north.
As well as overgrazing, soil erosion, desertification and deforestation, manure products with gaseous emissions have also had an effect on the environment; a single cow produces hundreds of litres of methane a day.Feeding the world's poor is not an issue of insufficient global resources, but of inefficient resource allocation.
Also, this summit lacks any of Rio's set-piece treaties, such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change, or the agreements to stop species loss and desertification, that added sparkle to the earlier summit.
One consequence is massive deforestation and desertification across Somalia, forcing nomadic herders off their lands.The wood is then hauled by donkey cart to crude kilns dug into the earth, where it is partially burnt for up to ten days before being allowed to cool for another ten.
