Climate change poses a threat to international efforts to ensure global food security. Paired with this challenge, agricultural practices involving forestry, fisheries, and livestock production generate a significant portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The world’s response to climate change will play a major role in determining how future generations are fed. In this Editor’s Pick blog, gain insight into how USAID is working to address food security.
Agriculture, Food Security, and Climate Change with a Gender Lens advances awareness of the importance of adapting agricultural systems and rural livelihoods to the challenges caused by climate change. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security is working to integrate the gender perspective in agricultural initiatives in Guatemala.
Common Themes Have Emerged from Climate Risk Management (CRM) Screenings of Food Security Programs, including that changing climate patterns affect food security. For example, more frequent and extreme droughts and floods are making farming more challenging, leading to abbreviated growing seasons, lost crops, and depleted family food stores. Climate variability and change are also causing less obvious effects on food security, many of which are just beginning to be understood.
Climate Smart Agriculture for a Food Secure Future offers insights into how Feed the Future is making climate change a central objective of their strategy. Global food security is under stress from increasingly intense and frequent heat waves, droughts, heavy rains, and major storms, and this blog offers insights into how the U.S. Government is addressing these challenges.
Farming Better and Improving Food Security in Malawi offers insight into important lessons from the United in Building and Advancing Life Expectations (UBALE) project. UBALE helped over 240,000 families in three districts across Southern Malawi produce more abundant harvests, increase income from agriculture, and learn important skills to help cope with changing climate patterns. The project linked agriculture with nutrition interventions to maximize the impact the program had on family nutrition.
Climate Risk Management Proves Critical to Sustaining Food Security in Cambodia is part of a blog series that aims to provide evidence-based deep dives into USAID case studies. The USAID-funded Feed the Future Cambodia Rice Field Fisheries II project outperformed productivity goals after incorporating climate-sensitive design, including planning for increased risk of drought and extreme heat events.
Sophie Schrader
Sophie Schrader serves as the Content and Social Media Manager for Climatelinks. She oversees social media and site content, as well as supporting research, writing blogs, and ensuring fresh and relevant resources and events are uploaded to the site. As a full-time Communications and Knowledge Management Associate on USAID’s Sharing Environment and Energy Knowledge (SEEK) project, Sophie contributes to efforts supporting USAID’s branches of Climate & Cross-Sectoral Strategy and Natural Climate Solutions. Prior to this role, Sophie supported retreats, courses, and events for high-level International Development practitioners such as the World Bank Group, World Health Organization, and International Monetary Fund. Sophie holds a B.A. in Sociology and Studio Art from The College of Wooster and completed a thesis focused on the real life impact of hashtags utilized in digital movements.
