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Today the Alliance Development Works and the Institute for Environment and Human Security of United Nations University launched the World Risk Report 2015.? The 74 page report, launched in Berlin in both English and German, details the intersectionality between disaster risk reduction and reducing food insecurity among vulnerable populations around the world.?
The World Risk Report 2015 ?looks at food security within the context of the World Risk Index which systematically considers a country's vulnerability, and its exposure to natural hazards (e.g. flood, storm, earthquake) to determine the disaster risk ranking of 171 countries around the world. Food insecurity can increase disaster risk, for example by forcing people to move to higher risk areas more vulnerable to natural hazards in search of food or arable land.
Additionally, limited resources hamper peoples' ability to respond effectively to a natural disaster. Globally, 2.5 billion people depend directly on agriculture for their survival. If their harvests, livestock or means of transportation are negatively affected by a natural hazard, their livelihoods are at risk. An investment in food security reduces the vulnerability of societies to natural hazards and conversely an investment in disaster risk reduction has a positive effect on food security.
The earthquake in Nepal in 2015 showed, for instance, how the country's food security was severely impacted by the earthquake. On the other hand, conditions of food insecurity also exacerbated the crisis caused by the earthquake because in remote mountainous areas of the country up to 70 per cent of the people were not able to eat or had only very little food in this crisis situation.
The World Risk Report concludes that the international community must invest in countries' food security to reduce their vulnerability to disasters, and it lays out concrete policy recommendations to the international community. Floods or cyclone events, for example, often do not only destroy harvests and graneries; they also destroy transportation infrastructure and thereby hamper the provision of supplies to crisis regions. In the worst case, the combination of disasters and food insecurity lead to a fatal downward spiral in which the people affected move from one crisis to the next.
In sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, there is overlap between the hotspot regions affected by hunger and those affected by high vulnerability to natural hazards. These areas are also expected to be heavily impacted by climate change, which presents further challenges for food security.?
This report comes at a crucial time with only two weeks until the start of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference () in Paris and just two months after the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals in September. Both food security and climate change are synergistic in nature and to solve one problem necessitates action on the other.
To read the full World Risk Report
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