climate change

Food security in southern Africa relies upon small-scale agriculture, a sector in which women take the lead. However, smallholder farmers are among the most vulnerable people to food insecurity, often lacking the resources and access needed to produce or procure adequate food.

The World Bank’s 'Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal' report delivers a troubling new assessment of the impact climate change is having on food security, water resources and ecosystems. It warns that without action heat waves and other weather extremes that occur once every hundred years, if ever, would become the new climate normal putting millions of people at risk.

The announcement of $9.2 billion in pledges to the Green Climate Fund ahead of the Lima climate summit is welcome but only a bare minimum, says Oxfam.

Many countries in Asia, including Bangladesh, Viet Nam, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines, should invest more in their governments’ capacity to protect their citizens given the region's vulnerability to climate change.

People around the world are trapped in a ‘toxic triangle’ made up of short-term financial investors, timid governments and fossil fuel companies, which threatens to push up  global temperatures, putting 400 million people at risk of hunger and drought by 2060. 

Climate change is already making people hungry, and the use of fossil fuels is largely to blame, representing the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

Rising food costs, climate change and dramatic changes in land tenure are increasing the reality of hunger and leaving food-insecure people feeling they “are rated as the cheapest of the cheapest”.