How Climate Change Is Increasing Global Hunger | naked capitalism
▻https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/09/climate-change-increasing-global-hunger.html
In other words, one in every nine people worldwide doesn’t get enough to eat. Even worse, 22.2 percent of children under five were affected by stunting in 2017 due to hunger.
What is causing these scary figures?
The main culprit is climate change and these figures might become even scarier if countries fail to tackle the problem and work to build up resistance to its unavoidable consequences, the report warns.
Extreme weather events–including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms–are said to be the key drivers behind rising global hunger.
The number of extreme climate-related disasters has doubled since the early 1990s, with an average of 213 annually from 1990 to 2016, harming agricultural productivity and leading to increases in food prices coupled with losses in income. It’s simple math that reduces access to food.
Data from the FAO study shows that the number of undernourished people tends to be higher in countries highly exposed to climate extremes.
As such, climate change is threatening to erase any gains made in the global effort to fight hunger.
“If we are to achieve a world without hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030, it is imperative that we accelerate and scale up actions to strengthen the resilience and adaptive capacity of food systems and people’s livelihoods in response to climate variability and extremes,” the heads of FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) wrote in a joint foreword to the report.
Undernourishment and severe food insecurity has increased the most in African regions, where some 256.5 million go hungry and nearly 30 percent are in the “severe food insecurity” category.
