Page - 13 - in options, Volume summer 2019

There is enough food on the planet today to provide every person with a healthy, balanced diet. Despite this, undernutrition affects one in nine people worldwide — and it is getting worse. rom 1990 to 2014, things were looking good for the fight to end hunger. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) report – The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014 – undernutrition had declined from 18.7% to 10.6% of the world population, and 63 countries had cut hunger in half. The UN Sustainable Development Goals, ambitious in the wake of recent success, set a target of zero hunger by 2030. The 2018 version of the FAO food security report was however a harsh wake-up call. In 2017, 821 million people were undernourished – 10.9% of the global population. In the three years since the last report, progress on hunger had switched directions. The FAO pinpointed climate change as a major cause of the turnaround. It continues to contribute to droughts, extreme heat, and weather events that affect crop production, and projections suggest that the problem will only get worse, especially in the most vulnerable regions. While food production may need to increase to meet nutrition needs, agriculture is also contributing to the challenges brought about by climate change — worldwide, agricultural production and related land-use change is responsible for around 25% of total human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. This messy issue is exactly the kind of problem IIASA was created to study. When you start to look at the problems in depth, the connections and repercussions of potential solutions spiral across disciplines and beyond country borders. Only by taking a systems view can policymakers and the public make informed changes that lead to a sustainable future. What is food security? When talking about their research on hunger and its drivers, researchers use the term food security. This is because adequate nutrition is not just about getting enough calories. It means having access to safe food that satisfies nutritional needs. It means being able to physically access food and have enough resources to buy it. Importantly, it also means knowing that nutritious and affordable food will be available in the future. “Food security is not just a question of how much food is produced and consumed, but also how adequate the nutrition is, and how resilient the food system is to various disturbances,” explains IIASA researcher Hugo Valin, who has been studying the intersection of food security and climate change. “Food security is a far more comprehensive and complicated topic than I realized when I first approached it,” says Yibo Luan, a former researcher in the IIASA Water Program (now at Wuhan Planning and Design Institute in China) who works on food security and assessment monitoring. “It is not just the balance of food consumption and food supply. It is an entire interdisciplinary research field that includes environment and ecosystem services, climate change, nutrition, population, and more.” F www.iiasa.ac.at 13OptionsSummer 2019