Household vulnerability to food insecurity in the face of climate change in Paraguay

Household vulnerability to food insecurity in the face of climate change in Paraguay
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2019-02-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9251313067

This working paper analyses the effect climate change is expected to have on agricultural productivity, caloric consumption, and vulnerability to food insecurity of household agricultural producers in Paraguay. Our results suggest that increasing temperatures and reduced precipitation will reduce agricultural productivity and caloric consumption, and increase vulnerability to food insecurity. Specifically, a 1 percent increase in average maximum temperatures is associated with a 5 percent reduction in agricultural productivity. A 5 percent reduction in agricultural productivity translates into nearly a 1 percent reduction in caloric consumption. Vulnerability to food insecurity in Paraguay is expected to increase by 28 percentage points by 2100 due to climate change, increasing fastest in areas where temperatures are increasing and rainfall is diminishing. We explore a number of interventions that policy makers can pursue to limit the impact of climate change on food insecurity.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018-09-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9251305722

New evidence this year corroborates the rise in world hunger observed in this report last year, sending a warning that more action is needed if we aspire to end world hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. Updated estimates show the number of people who suffer from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to prevailing levels from almost a decade ago. Although progress continues to be made in reducing child stunting, over 22 percent of children under five years of age are still affected. Other forms of malnutrition are also growing: adult obesity continues to increase in countries irrespective of their income levels, and many countries are coping with multiple forms of malnutrition at the same time – overweight and obesity, as well as anaemia in women, and child stunting and wasting.

State of Food and Agriculture

State of Food and Agriculture
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Organization
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2017-01-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9789251093740

Unless action is taken now to make agriculture more sustainable, productive and resilient, climate change impacts will seriously compromise food production in countries and regions that are already highly food-insecure. The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015, represents a new beginning in the global effort to stabilize the climate before it is too late. It recognizes the importance of food security in the international response to climate change, as reflected by many countries prominent focus on the agriculture sector in their planned contributions to adaptation and mitigation. To help put those plans into action, this report identifies strategies, financing opportunities, and data and information needs. It also describes transformative policies and institutions that can overcome barriers to implementation. The State of Food and Agriculture is produced annually. Each edition contains an overview of the current global agricultural situation, as well as more in-depth coverage of a topical theme."

A Systems Approach to Analyze Household Vulnerability to Food Insecurity in Rural Southern Mali Using a Spatially-explicit Integrated Social and Biophysical Model

A Systems Approach to Analyze Household Vulnerability to Food Insecurity in Rural Southern Mali Using a Spatially-explicit Integrated Social and Biophysical Model
Author: Rajiv Paudel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2020
Genre: Electronic dissertations
ISBN:

Mali is expected to be profoundly impacted by climate change. Its mid-century temperature could increase by 2°C, which could have detrimental impacts on crop production. Besides, northern Mali is currently highly arid is not suitable for agriculture. The South has the responsibility to feed the national population. However, the region is experiencing rapid population growth. Mali is likely to struggle to feed its growing population under climate change. Food production and food security in the South have a wider influence on the national food supply. Food security lies at the interface of biophysical, climatic, and socio-economic systems and demands a systemic approach for evaluation. Using a biophysical crop model with an agent-based model of household food systems, we capture the dynamics within and across multiple associated systems. We focus in the South and use multidisciplinary tools to explore the trajectories of household food security under climate change and population growth in the region.The dissertation is organized into three research papers. Paper 1, entitled "A Largely Unsupervised Domain-Independent Qualitative Data Extraction Approach for Empirical Agent-based Model Development.", focuses on exploring household food systems and identifying actors of household food security and their behaviors. Chiefly, we aim to extract the information needed to develop an ABM of household food systems. We apply largely automatic efficient approaches for information extraction from contextually rich qualitative field narratives. Using a combination of semantics and syntactic Natural Language Processing, we identify actors (agents) of household food security, their properties, and actions and interactions responsible for household food supply. The data extraction is primarily unsupervised and, apart from being efficient, it controls manual manipulation and bias introduction in the model development. We use the extracted information for developing a contextual model of household food security. Finally, we subject the model to stakeholder evaluation for credibility and validity.Paper 2, entitled "Analyzing household vulnerability to food insecurity in rural southern Mali - a coupled biophysical and social model approach", combines a biophysical process-based crop model with an ABM of household food system to analyze household vulnerability to food insecurity in southern Mali. We use the Systems Approach to Land Use Sustainability (SALUS) as the crop model to simulate the cultivation of maize, millet, and sorghum in the region. While SALUS provides information on food production, ABM simulates interactions for food access. We measure household vulnerability using Food Security Vulnerability Index (FSVI), a coping-based index, that evaluates households' vulnerability to food insecurity by assessing the mechanisms used by the households to address household food scarcity. Running a business-as-usual scenario, defined by low access to input, high population growth, and a high emission climate change scenario at Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 level, we find that maize and sorghum lose their productivity significantly under future climate change. Besides, the region sees a significant increase in its food insecure population. Around 80% of the regional households are at risk of food insecurity by mid-century. In paper 3, entitled "Global or Local? Effects of policy interventions on household food security in Koutiala, southern Mali: A coupled biophysical and social systems approach", we evaluate the effectiveness of selected global and local level policy intervention in promoting household food security in the South. The model recommends local level interventions that include improved access to input and lower population growth for a prompt and significant increase in food security in the region. More than 60% of the regional households could be food secure under the combinations of the interventions. However, the global level intervention that consists of lowering emission to RCP4.5 level does not have significant impacts on local household food production and food security.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-07-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 925132901X

Updates for many countries have made it possible to estimate hunger in the world with greater accuracy this year. In particular, newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world. Nevertheless, the revision confirms the trend reported in past editions: the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report also shows that the burden of malnutrition in all its forms continues to be a challenge. There has been some progress for child stunting, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding, but at a pace that is still too slow. Childhood overweight is not improving and adult obesity is on the rise in all regions. The report complements the usual assessment of food security and nutrition with projections of what the world may look like in 2030, if trends of the last decade continue. Projections show that the world is not on track to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators are also not on track to meet global nutrition targets. The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. Meeting SDG 2 targets will only be possible if people have enough food to eat and if what they are eating is nutritious and affordable. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs associated with current food consumption patterns, as well as the potential cost savings if food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include sustainability considerations. The report then concludes with a discussion of the policies and strategies to transform food systems to ensure affordable healthy diets, as part of the required efforts to end both hunger and all forms of malnutrition.

The impact of disasters and crises on agriculture and food security: 2021

The impact of disasters and crises on agriculture and food security: 2021
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2021-03-17
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9251340714

On top of a decade of exacerbated disaster loss, exceptional global heat, retreating ice and rising sea levels, humanity and our food security face a range of new and unprecedented hazards, such as megafires, extreme weather events, desert locust swarms of magnitudes previously unseen, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Agriculture underpins the livelihoods of over 2.5 billion people – most of them in low-income developing countries – and remains a key driver of development. At no other point in history has agriculture been faced with such an array of familiar and unfamiliar risks, interacting in a hyperconnected world and a precipitously changing landscape. And agriculture continues to absorb a disproportionate share of the damage and loss wrought by disasters. Their growing frequency and intensity, along with the systemic nature of risk, are upending people’s lives, devastating livelihoods, and jeopardizing our entire food system. This report makes a powerful case for investing in resilience and disaster risk reduction – especially data gathering and analysis for evidence informed action – to ensure agriculture’s crucial role in achieving the future we want.

Reducing Poverty, Protecting Livelihoods, and Building Assets in a Changing Climate

Reducing Poverty, Protecting Livelihoods, and Building Assets in a Changing Climate
Author: Dorte Verner
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2010-06-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0821383787

Climate change is the defining development challenge of our time. More than a global environmental issue, climate change and variability threaten to reverse recent progress in poverty reduction and economic growth. Both now and over the long run, climate change and variability threatens human and social development by restricting the fulfillment of human potential and by disempowering people and communities in reducing their livelihoods options. Communities across Latin America and the Caribbean are already experiencing adverse consequences from climate change and variability. Precipitation has increased in the southeastern part of South America, and now often comes in the form of sudden deluges, leading to flooding and soil erosion that endanger people s lives and livelihoods. Southwestern parts of South America and western Central America are seeing a decrease in precipitation and an increase in droughts. Increasing heat and drought in Northeast Brazil threaten the livelihoods of already-marginal smallholders, and may turn parts of the eastern Amazon rainforest into savannah. The Andean inter-tropical glaciers are shrinking and expected to disappear altogether within the next 20-40 years, with significant consequences for water availability. These environmental changes will impact local livelihoods in unprecedented ways. Poverty, inequality, water access, health, and migration are and will be measurably affected by climate change. Using an innovative research methodology, this study finds quantitative evidence of large variations in impacts across regions. Many already poor regions are becoming poorer; traditional livelihoods are being challenged in unprecedented ways; water scarcity is increasing, particularly in poor arid areas; human health is deteriorating; and climate-induced migration is already taking place and may increase. Successfully reducing social vulnerability to climate change and variability requires action and commitment at multiple levels. This volume offers key operational recommendations at the government, community, and household levels with particular emphasis placed on enhancing good governance and technical capacity in the public sector, building social capital in local communities, and protecting the asset base of poor households.

Farming Systems and Poverty

Farming Systems and Poverty
Author: John A. Dixon
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2001
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9789251046272

A joint FAO and World Bank study which shows how the farming systems approach can be used to identify priorities for the reduction of hunger and poverty in the main farming systems of the six major developing regions of the world.

Social Dimensions of Climate Change

Social Dimensions of Climate Change
Author: Robin Mearns
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2009-12-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0821381423

While major strides have been made in the scientific understanding of climate change, much less understood is how these dynamics in the physical enviornment interact with socioeconomic systems. This book brings together the latest knowledge on the consequences of climate change for society and how best to address them.