Climate Change

As global temperatures rise and climate-related disasters become more frequent, the need to adapt is rapidly increasing. That need for adaptation—from adjusting farming practices to diversifying livelihoods and strengthening infrastructure—is most acute in vulnerable low- and middle-income countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti and Viet Nam.

Conflict, extreme weather events, and economic shocks led to worsening food security outcomes throughout much of Africa south of the Sahara in 2024, according to the recently released 2025 Global Report on Food Crises. While a number of countries saw improvements in their levels of acute food insecurity, all regions saw an overall increase in the number of acute food-insecure people.

Climate change impacts—including increasing temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and intensifying extreme weather events—have hit Nigeria hard, reducing agricultural productivity, driving up food prices, and limiting access to nutritious food. Climate-related damage to roads, irrigation, education, and health care infrastructure has also undermined food production and access to essential services.

The world faced a stark inflection point in 2024, as the continued rise in the number of people facing crisis-to-catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity meets sharp reductions in funding for humanitarian assistance. The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), released today, reports that 295.3 million people across 53 countries/territories faced acute food insecurity in 2024. This represents a tripling of the number of people facing acute hunger since 2016 and a doubling since 2020 (Figure 1).

Figure 1

How households respond to systemic shocks—food price volatility, seasonal fluctuations in agricultural production, conflict, pandemics, and extreme weather events—can play an important role in long-term food security, economic stability, and resilience at both the household and the societal level. A new project paper from the CGIAR Initiative on Fragility, Conflict, and Migration finds that in Mali, the coping mechanisms households resort to in the face of such shocks are often high-risk and reactionary.