Vulnerability and food insecurity in the light of climate change: a comprehensive framework for the household context

The growing threat of climate change has worsened food insecurity worldwide, particularly for smallholder farmers in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province, South Africa. This study aims to compare the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) indicators before and after the impacts of climate change on smallholder farmers in KZN in 2024. A systematic sampling approach, combined with a descriptive study design, was employed to select sixty farmers. Data on personal characteristics and HFIAS were collected, subjected to face validity and reliability tests, and analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 29, with frequency counts, percentages, and paired sample t-tests. The comparison of food security before and after the effects of climate change shows a significant difference (t = -6.70, p < 0.01). The findings suggest that climate change exacerbates food insecurity, particularly affecting elements such as food availability, access, perception, and insecurity prevalence. The study concludes that climate change has worsened food insecurity on smallholder farms, particularly by increasing dependence on purchased food. The policy implications emphasize areas that need targeted interventions, driven by increased indicators of food availability, access, perception, and insecurity following the onset of climate change. The study recommends strategies to enhance farmers' resilience, including expanding access to climate-smart agricultural technologies and extending agricultural extension services.

Who Eats, Where, What, and How? COVID-19, Food Security, and Canadian Foodscapes

A goat-centered approach to farming can help shift rural agrarian households and communities toward gender-inclusive climate change adaptation in agriculture to enhance food security and nutrition in sub-Saharan Africa. Gender inequality, climate change, and food and nutrition insecurity are the most defining and deeply intertwined socioeconomic and environmental challenges in rural communities in this region. This chapter offers an overview of the potential of goat rearing as a sustainable and holistic approach to addressing these challenges. The failure to address gender inequality and climate change has thrown sub-Saharan Africa into a state of perpetual food scarcity due to compromised food production, consequently condemning rural communities and their people to extreme poverty and malnutrition. Because of this scenario, many internal and external development agencies have put several measures in place to alleviate the situation, which has long preyed upon the region and continues to frustrate food stability there. The total failure of the previous autonomous attempt to address the triple challenges of gender inequality climate change, and food and nutrition insecurity at the household level has led to the exploration and endorsement of more sustainable and multifaceted approaches. We propose that goat rearing is one such initiative, as it combines the empowerment of women in agriculture to ensure availability of the basic food needs of the household with sustained animal production due to goats’ ability to adapt to harsh environmental conditions. The goat-centered multifactorial approach is focused on the exploitation of the interlinkages among these socioeconomic and environmental ills. The major assumption is that goat rearing in rural economies simultaneously curtails the risk of food and nutrition insecurity by acting as an entry point of gender equality while leveraging the opportunities that goat rearing will effectively offset adversities posed by climate change. In most instances, women are potentially more vulnerable than men, as they directly experience the adverse effects of climate change in agricultural production, in turn compromising food and nutrition security. Goat rearing is central to the removal of systemic barriers that hold women back from equal participation in agriculture by broadening their socioeconomic opportunities, hence playing a significant role in agricultural value chains. The goat-rearing sustainability concept is based on establishing and maintaining the circumstances under which people and nature can subsist in productive harmony, which allows fulfilling the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations. Despite the adverse effects of climate change, the goat population has continued to proliferate in the harshest agroecological regions, which demonstrates that goats have managed to adapt to the current unfriendly environmental conditions. It is assumed that promoting goat rearing will narrow the gender equality gap between men and women and enhance the participation of women in agriculture, hence improving productivity and food and nutrition security. Goats, due to their large numbers and deep embedment in rural communities, have constantly contributed to poor rural farmers’ livelihoods in many ways, and their contributions tend to be significant. This chapter reviews the potential of goat rearing as a sustainable and holistic approach to addressing the triple challenges of gender inequality, climate change, and food insecurity in rural communities of sub-Saharan Africa.

Food insecurity (FI) and water insecurity (WI) refer to limited or uncertain access to safe and adequate food and water respectively, which affect millions of people globally. Traditionally, these insecurities have been approached separately in research, practice, and policy. However, there is growing evidence that WI and FI interact with each other through nutrition and disease pathways and pose significant threats to physical and psychosocial health, particularly in vulnerable populations living under adverse social conditions (e.g., poverty, stigmatization, racism, poor governance, inadequate infrastructure, climate change). Since the late 2000s, applied anthropologists and interdisciplinary research teams have conducted studies on the intersection of FI and WI and their effects on human health in different settings. Often, these studies use a biocultural/biosocial approach and mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) not only to analyze the association between these insecurities and health, but also to investigate how individuals, households, and communities experience and respond to co-occurring FI and WI. Additionally, such work often seeks to understand the political and social determinants of FI and WI. Results from these studies show that FI and WI have independent, mediating, and simultaneous effects on physical and mental health, depending on various factors such as age, gender, and setting. In addition, scholars have called for, and increasingly operationalized, validated experience-based scales that measure concurrent FI and WI, utilizing such instruments in applied work and evaluations of interventions. Finally, the research suggests the need to understand buffering mechanisms that protect some individuals (e.g., children) from these insecurities. An approach that can be used to examine the impact of co-occurring FI and WI on human health is that of syndemic theory, which examines the interaction of two or more diseases and the role that social conditions play in amplifying the effects of these interactions. This theory has been used successfully in research on a variety of topics including the interaction of substance, abuse, violence, and AIDS in low-income environments. In an attempt to conceptualize the FI-WI syndemic, a model that can be used in future research, practice, and policy is proposed. In doing so, the syndemic approach will make important contributions to addressing several of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals in an integrated manner, specifically those related to Zero Hunger, Good Health and Well-being, and Clean Water and Sanitation.

Food and nutrition insecurity continues to pose a serious global challenge, reflecting government shortcomings in meeting international obligations to ensure the availability, accessibility, and quality of food and to ensure the highest attainable standard of health of their peoples. With global drivers like climate change, urbanization, greater armed conflict, and the globalization of unhealthy diet, particularly in under-resourced countries, food insecurity is rapidly becoming an even greater challenge for those living in poverty. International human rights law can serve a critical role in guiding governments that are struggling to protect the health of their populations, particularly among the most susceptible groups, in responding to food and nutrition insecurity. This article explores and advocates for a human rights approach to food and nutrition security, specifically identifying legal mechanisms to “domesticate” relevant international human rights standards through national policy. Recognizing nutrition security as a determinant of public health, this article recognizes the important links between the four main elements of food security (i.e., availability, stability, utilization, and access) and the normative attributes of the right to health and the right to food (i.e., availability, accessibility, affordability, and quality). In drawing from the evolution of international human rights instruments, official documents issued by international human rights treaty bodies, as well as past scholarship at the intersection of the right to health and right to food, this article interprets and articulates the intersectional rights-based obligations of national governments in the face of food and nutrition insecurity.

In 2012, food insecurity is still a major global concern as 1 billion people are suffering from starvation, under-, and malnutrition, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has concluded that we are still far from reaching millennium development goal (MDG) number 1: to halve extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people suffering from hunger is estimated at 239 million, and this figure could increase in the near future.There are many examples of food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa, some of them having reached catastrophic dimensions, for example, in the Horn of Africa or southern Madagascar. Food insecurity is not just about insufficient food production, availability, and intake, it is also about the poor quality or nutritional value of the food. The detrimental situation of women and children is particularly serious, as well as the situation among female teenagers, who receive less food than their male counterparts in the same households.Soaring food prices and food riots are among the many symptoms of the prevailing food crisis and insecurity. Climate change and weather vagaries, present and forecast, are generally compounding food insecurity and drastically changing farming activities, as diagnosed by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in June 2011.The key cause of food insecurity is inadequate food production. Since the global food crisis of 2007–2008, there has been an increasing awareness throughout the world that we must produce more and better food; and we should not be derailed from this goal, despite some relief brought by the good cereal harvests in 2011–2012. This is particularly true in sub-Saharan Africa, which needs and wants to make its own green revolution.The African challenge indeed is key to mitigating food insecurity in the world. Commitments were made by the heads of states and governments of the African Union to double the part of their domestic budgets devoted to agriculture in 2010–2011, so as to reach 10%. Technical solutions exist and there are indeed, throughout Africa, good examples of higher-yielding and sustainable agriculture. But good practices have to spread throughout the continent, while at the same time social and economic measures, as well as political will, are indispensable ingredients of Africa’s green revolution. It is also necessary that international donors fulfil their commitment to help African farmers and rural communities and protect them against unfair trade, competition, and dumping of cheap agrifood products from overseas.

Food and nutrition insecurity continues to pose a serious global challenge, reflecting government shortcomings in meeting international obligations to ensure the availability, accessibility, and quality of food and to ensure the highest attainable standard of health of their peoples. With global drivers like climate change, urbanization, greater armed conflict, and the globalization of unhealthy diet, particularly in under-resourced countries, food insecurity is rapidly becoming an even greater challenge for those living in poverty. International human rights law can serve a critical role in guiding governments that are struggling to protect the health of their populations, particularly among the most susceptible groups, in responding to food and nutrition insecurity. This article explores and advocates for a human rights approach to food and nutrition security, specifically identifying legal mechanisms to “domesticate” relevant international human rights standards through national policy. Recognizing nutrition security as a determinant of public health, this article recognizes the important links between the four main elements of food security (i.e., availability, stability, utilization, and access) and the normative attributes of the right to health and the right to food (i.e., availability, accessibility, affordability, and quality). In drawing from the evolution of international human rights instruments, official documents issued by international human rights treaty bodies, as well as past scholarship at the intersection of the right to health and right to food, this article interprets and articulates the intersectional rights-based obligations of national governments in the face of food and nutrition insecurity.

Towards smallholder food and water security: Climate variability in the context of multiple livelihood hazards in Nicaragua

One in eight individuals globally suffers from mental health challenges. Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly those reliant on rainfed agriculture, are especially vulnerable due to mounting ecological stress and socio-economic instability. Despite this, limited evidence exists on how food insecurity and climate change resilience (resilience), both independently and jointly, impact their mental health. Guided by the Social Determinants of Mental Health (SDMH) framework, this study explores these associations in the context of northern Ghana. We used cross-sectional survey data (n = 1,033) and applied ordered logistic regression techniques. Findings show that food insecurity (OR = 4.8, p < 0.001, CI: 2.9–7.9) and poor resilience (OR = 3.6, p < 0.001, CI: 2.1–6.3) were significantly associated with poor mental health. Given the potential connections between resilience and food insecurity, we interacted the two variables to examine their effects on mental health. Remarkably, their interaction further increased the risk of poor mental health (OR = 1.5, p < 0.001, CI: 1.4–1.6). Exposure to climatic stressors, including droughts (OR = 5.6, p < 0.001, CI: 3.2–9.6) and floods (OR = 2.0, p < 0.001, CI: 1.1–3.6), was linked to poor mental health. Additional risk factors included older age, higher education, marriage, and debt. Protective factors included remittances and joint decision-making. Food insecurity and poor resilience significantly and interactively contribute to smallholders’ poor mental health. Integrated policy interventions that enhance food security, reinforce adaptive resilience, and incorporate psychosocial support into agricultural and climate programs are urgently needed to protect smallholders’ mental well-being in climate-vulnerable regions.

Water, energy, and food (WEF) insecurities are significant issues that are being worsened by climate change. Smallholder farmers in semi-arid regions of Sub-Saharan Africa are among the most vulnerable to these insecurities. Adopting integrated approaches to address these insecurities is critical to achieving sustainable development goals (SDG6, SDG7, and SDG2). Our study takes a household-centric approach to investigate the relationship between water and energy and food insecurity. The results from ordered logistic regression show that households facing water (OR = 2.709, p < 0.001) and energy (OR = 2.690, p < 0.001) insecurity were more likely to experience food insecurity. Similarly, households with chronically ill members (OR = 2.896, p < 0.001) were more likely prone to food insecurity compared to those without. Households in which overall health was perceived as good were less likely to be food insecured (OR = 0.479, p < 0.001) compared to those with poor health. The findings highlight the interdependence of WEF, underscoring the need for integrated policies to tackle these challenges comprehensively in semi-arid regions. In this context, the focus should be on interventions that target improving water and energy security, leading to long-term improvements in food security.

ObjectivesRecently, food insecurity has been a major public health issue along with the food crisis caused by COVID-19, climate change, and the polarization of food supply due to socioeconomic disparities. Food insecurity is known to be related to the food choices and environment of the consumer. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the food security statuses of adults in Jeju and investigate their food purchase patterns, food policy recognition, and food environment satisfaction.MethodsBased on data from the 2022 Jeju Food Survey, 346 adults aged ≥ 19 years in Jeju were classified into food security and insecurity groups (quantitatively and qualitatively) using the questionnaire. Food purchase patterns, including purchasing frequency, items, and reasons, were surveyed for local and eco-friendly foods. The recognition and necessity of several food policies and satisfaction with diet and food environment (availability, accessibility, affordability, accommodation, and acceptability) were measured using the Likert scale.ResultsAmong the total participants, 47.4% were in the food insecurity group. The frequency of purchasing local and eco-friendly foods did not significantly differ by food security status. The insecurity group exhibited a higher recognition rate of basic rights to food (36.0%) than the security group (24.7%, P = 0.023). The recognition and necessity of specific food policies did not significantly differ by food security status, except for the policy of promoting food communities, for which the food security group exhibited higher recognition than the food insecurity group did (P = 0.004). The food insecurity group exhibited significantly lower scores regarding satisfaction toward diet and food environment factors (P < 0.05 for all).ConclusionOverall, the food security group reported higher satisfaction with their diet and food environment than the food insecurity group. Further in-depth studies to investigate the determinants of food insecurity and effective promotional strategies for food policies are needed.

Research often fails to account for the specific pathways by which climatic factors can cause social unrest. One challenge lies in understanding the distinct effects of food insecurity and water insecurity – which we term ‘staple insecurities’ – while accounting for their interrelated nature, especially at high-resolution spatio-temporal scales. To unpack these dynamics, we leverage geolocated Twitter data across urban areas in Kenya and deploy a supervised machine learning approach to separately identify geolocated tweets concerning food and water insecurity, in both English and Swahili. The data are then aggregated to create daily measures of food and water insecurity for standardized grid-cells to examine how perceived food insecurity moderates and/or reinforces perceived water insecurity’s impacts on social unrest, and vice versa. Our findings suggest that food and water insecurities’ respective effects should be interpreted as mutually reinforcing – in compelling citizens to take to the streets – rather than as independent. Those concerned with climate change’s impact on conflict should hence endeavor to jointly account for both forms of insecurity, and their interactive effects.

Science Frontiers in Agronomy, Crops, and Soils

476 5. C hildhood malnutrition encompasses a plethora of nutritional disorders that include stunting, underweight, wasting, severe acute malnutrition (SAM), and micronutrient deficiency disorders. Overweight and obesity, at the other end of the nutritional spectrum, are also manifestations of childhood malnutrition. Nearly 24 million children (younger than 5 years) worldwide experience SAM. The vast majority is located in Africa and Asia (8 million are in India alone). A child with SAM is 10 times more likely to die than a wellnourished child. SAM is one of the top 3 nutrition-related causes of death in children younger than 5 years. Estimates of deaths directly attributable to SAM varied from 0.5 to 2 million annually. Moderate and severe child malnutrition account for 40% to 50% of all deaths in children younger than 5 years. If the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (http://www.un.org/millennium goals) of reducing children malnutrition and mortality by 50% by 2015 are to be met, SAM needs to be prevented and controlled effectively.

Seasonality remains a prime cause of food scarcity and hunger in the rural areas of South Asia with millions facing recurring food insecurity each year. With the impacts of climate change becoming apparent, the probability of sharpening food insecurity is high. Climate change brings with it increasing uncertainty. It is no longer a specific season which the farmer must gear up to face, but also the uncertainty regarding the advent of the season, its duration and the intensity of impact in terms of drought, rainfall, flooding, etc. To equip the small and marginal farmer to cope with the additional burden of seasonal uncertainty, agriculture policy and welfare measures need to be tailored to fit the changing situation. This paper reviews the impacts of seasonality on food security in the rural areas of South Asia, and projects the scenario which is likely to result with climate change. Existing policies/interventions to provide food security and secure livelihoods are assessed and recommendations are made to effectively co-ordinate government policies, public-private partnerships, corporate and voluntary initiatives to build resilience to climate change and ensure food security in the region.