Climate change is steadily weakening the foundations of food security: reducing food availability, making food less accessible, worsening malnutrition and diminishing the effectiveness of food use. And as shocks repeat, it turns short-term stress into long-term fragility.
These pressures are felt most severely in countries and communities with the least capacity to cope. Yet, most measures used in food security analysis capture only part of the picture and some indices do not cover the countries most at risk.
To address this gap, IIED constructed a new Food Security Index for 162 countries, which assesses performance across four distinct pillars: availability, access, utilisation and sustainability. This approach allows us to see not just which countries are food insecure, but also why, allowing us to develop policy and programmatic responses to address them.