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Strong agricultural cooperatives could be a powerful pathway to protect vulnerable populations from food insecurity caused by shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent paper in Agriculture & Food Security.

The challenges of climate change and food security are closely intertwined, with agriculture both driving and being impacted by extreme weather events. Policymakers around the globe are faced with the need to increase food production to feed growing populations while reducing that production’s negative impacts on the environment. According to a recent article in Global Environmental Change, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) provides an effective way to enhance countries’ climate resilience while simultaneously ensuring food and nutrition security.

This post originally appeared on IFPRI.org

Migration is a crucial element for economic development, as it offers workers in low- and middle-income countries ways to diversify and increase their income as well as ways to smooth their consumption over time. In addition, migration allows workers to send remittances, providing their households with the resources needed for investments. Yet social norms and income constraints also influence who migrates and why.

The number of African countries facing acute food insecurity rose in June, according to the latest AGRA Food Security Monitor. The Food Monitor defines acute food insecurity as occurring when more than 50 percent of the population lacks access to sufficient food supplies. Acutely food-insecure countries in the region now include South Sudan (60%), Burkina Faso (59%), and Mali (58%).

The latest Global Hunger Index (GHI) was released this week by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Welthungerhilfe, and Concern Worldwide. Presenting an annual, multidimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger, the 2015 GHI utilizes data and projections from various UN agencies for 2010-2016 and provides scores from 9.9 or lower to denote “low” hunger to 35-49.9 to denote “alarming” hunger. (For more information about the 2015 GHI and overall global results, please read this new post on the global Food Security Portal.)