Is any country truly food-secure in the climate change era?
Though weak spots exist even in developed economies, new research shows low-income, low-emission countries will once again fare worst.
Flooding of the Mississippi River has a huge impact on farms and local people. The Food Security Index highlights even wealthy countries might be surprisingly exposed to repeated extreme weather shocks (Photo: Lance Cheung/US Department of Agriculture, via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)
Most governments now accept climate change will likely cause significant disruption to food supplies, and that in many places it is already leading to failed harvests or lower crop yields.
The new IIED Food Security Index gives ministers and officials the granular data they need to identify weaknesses in their systems of food supply, making them fit to withstand increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather.
The index incorporates data from a huge number of sources and, thanks to complex regression analysis, allows users to examine that data as it relates to four ‘pillars’ of food security.
These are the availability, meaning existence, of adequate food; the accessibility of that food to households, for example, whether it’s affordable; its nutritional value and whether people are healthy enough to absorb those nutrients (‘utilisation’); and the sustainability, or resilience, of food systems.
Ritu Bharadwaj, the researcher behind this work, said: “Unpacking all four pillars is important because climate shocks rarely affect food security through only one channel. They tend to hit several aspects across these pillars at once, and the dominant constraint can differ between countries.
“For example, a heatwave might damage crops close to harvest time, creating an immediate pressure on availability. If instead that extreme heat prevents a family’s breadwinner from working, their lower income means they’re less able to access food even if it’s otherwise available.”
The injustice at the heart of global food security
At a global scale the index reveals a deeply divided and unfair distribution of food insecurity: lower-income countries tend to score much lower than the wealthiest, and the gap only widens when the predicted effects of climate change are factored in.
Analysis shows a strong link between higher historic greenhouse gas emissions and improved food security, while entire regions that have contributed much less to global temperature rise – sub-Saharan Africa in particular – languish towards the bottom of the rankings.
Vulnerability to the effects of climate change is correlated with both lower historic emissions and lower food security scores, a glaring injustice.
“In fragile and conflict-affected countries, climate change is already reshaping the realities of food security,” said Abdihakim Ainte, director of food security and climate change in the Somalia government.
“In Somalia, repeated droughts and floods are disrupting agricultural production, pastoral livelihoods and local markets, pushing vulnerable communities closer to crisis with each successive shock. When climate impacts intersect with fragility, limited fiscal space and ongoing humanitarian pressures, the risks to food security become far more severe.
“This report provides valuable new evidence on how climate change could further intensify these pressures across countries… it highlights how rising temperatures and increasing climate variability are likely to deepen existing inequalities in food systems. For countries facing fragility, strengthening food security is inseparable from strengthening resilience.”
Rich countries far from immune
But economic power isn’t necessarily an impervious bulwark against repeated extreme weather shocks.
Every extra US$1,000 GDP per capita has a marked positive effect on availability, accessibility and utilisation, but much less on sustainability. In other words, strain induced by climate change shows first in supply chains and countries’ underlying ability to keep quality food accessible over time – even in the rich world.
This is illustrated by the case of the United States of America, whose overall food security score is 8.74 out of 10. It scores extremely high for availability (9.49) but only 7.25 for sustainability, behind countries like the United Kingdom (8.43) and Germany (8.25) which have comparable overall scores.
Factoring in 2°C of global warming reduces that score by 0.52 points, to 6.73, compared to a decline of 0.34 for the UK and 0.40 for Germany. This reduction is well above the fall in the US’ overall score in a 2°C warming scenario (-0.44), showing the fragility of the sustainability pillar relative to the other three.
Through its ASPIRE project, IIED has previously set out how beefed-up social protection programmes can soften the blow of climate-related shocks. Having these protection measures kick in before disaster strikes not only saves money compared to scrambling to fix problems afterwards, but can have positive effects on food security.
