Food security and resilience

Our health and active life depend critically on nutritious food. While agriculture and food production increased over the past decades, millions of people are still unable to meet their dietary needs, starkly contrasting the overconsumption and the enormous amount of food wasted daily.

In 2021, one in five people in Africa was affected by hunger, and the continent had the highest prevalence of undernourished people globally. We argue that food systems in Africa can be more resilient if their development includes climate adaptation.

In their Comment in @CommsEarth, Manuel Morales and colleagues argue that we must act now to protect green agricultural policies in the EU to ensure food security in the future.

Land suitable for profitable diversification of agricultural systems is mainly located in Europe and North America because of well-developed infrastructure, according to a maximum entropy modelling approach driven by socio-economic variables.

Both food and water security can be achieved in the Indus Basin in the short term through intensification of wheat production, land leveling and irrigation expansion, but not in the long term under future high population scenarios, suggests a spatially explicit adaptation pathway framework.

Current cereal crop production levels could be sustained with significantly reduced total global fertilisation if nitrogen fertiliser use is evenly distributed across global croplands, according to an analysis of simulations from the LandscapeDNDC biogeochemical model

The forecast of crop harvests in important exporting regions can trigger production reactions in the other hemisphere to compensate for seasonal price fluctuations and help stabilize the agricultural market, according to an analysis of simulations of an economic model driven by remote sensing data.

Small-scale inland and coastal fisheries improve physical and economic access to food for communities in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda, according to analyses of nationally representative data.

In West Africa, regional cooperation in risk pooling can strengthen the reliability of food supply and reduce the reliance on international aid to guarantee farmers’ livelihoods, according to a stochastic model that considers optimal crop allocation based on food security targets.

A trans-disciplinary framework shows how collaborative engagement and multi-phase development pathways can aid scaling up urban agriculture to transform food systems and support robust urban resilience and sustainability.

Effective solutions for food systems transformation must be designed in a participatory way. This study illustrates the application of an integrated assessment framework to explore stakeholder-driven scenarios towards climate-smart nutrition security in Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia.

Transformative change towards sustainable food systems depends on interactions across the spectrum.

Using a resilience heuristic to diagnose food systems will allow us to identify and relieve the underlying drivers of food system challenges. This perspective identifies four ‘aching points’ that are central points of tension in the local–global debate, and proposes transformative pathways towards more sustainable and resilient food systems.

Agricultural trade challenges resource management domestically and globally. This study finds that up to 26% of global phosphorus fertilizer use is tied to export crops and livestock commodities, suggesting trade partners will need to coordinate to buffer domestic food supplies from phosphorus shortages.