Spotlight on climate change risk

Warning of growing hunger

CLIMATE change threats, from worsening drought and flooding to sea level rise, could increase the risks of hunger and child malnutrition around the world by 20% by 2050, food security researchers warned yesterday.

But looking carefully at the very different risks facing each country, region and type of food producer could help reduce that threat of growing hunger, they said.

In North Africa, for instance, both herders and farmers face risks from more frequent, longer and more intense heatwaves and declining water availability, while population growth and greater urbanisation could also hit food security, according to a report by the World Food Programme (WFP) released yesterday at the UN climate talks in Bonn.

In South Asia, by comparison, dense populations of farmers face threats from worsening floods, cyclones and droughts, as well as long-term threats to the stability of monsoons and water flow in glacier-fed rivers.

“Different groups are affected by different types of risks,” said Gernot Laganda, the director of climate and disaster risk reduction programmes at WFP.

Catastrophic threats of large-scale losses of crops or animals might be dealt with in part with insurance plans, Laganda said. But more regular seasonal threats could not be insured, he said, because the problems come too frequently.

In those cases, building savings groups among women farmers, for instance, to ensure cash is on hand to deal with the crop failures, could be a better way to deal with risks.

The report aims to give country governments, and food security organisations, a clearer and more specific look at the threats they face, and better tools to deal with them. It looks in detail at particularly threatened regions, including parts of Africa and Asia, and at 15 specific countries, from Afghanistan to Mali.

One surprise from the work, Laganda said, was that it was not always the poorest countries that were most vulnerable to hunger threats.

“Sometimes we assume middle-income countries have a much easier time – which is not necessarily the case,” he said.

South Asia, in particular, had big numbers of hungry people, he said, and overall “the largest vulnerabilities to loss and damage in food systems occur in Asia”.

In Africa, drought was the biggest threat to hunger levels, but conflicts also played a big role, he said.

Laganda said such differences needed a careful look if countries and food security agencies were to better manage coming climate threats and achieve the international goal of ending hunger by 2030, one of a set of so-called Sustainable Development Goals.

And aid agencies like WFP – as much as governments – needed to focus more on risk management, he said.

Mikael Eriksson, who works on climate, energy and environmental issues for Sweden’s government, said the growing complexity of humanitarian disasters required innovation and rethinking old ways of doing things.

“Prevention is so much more efficient than disaster management,” he said. – Reuters