Environmental (Commonwealth Union)_ As global extremes of climate intensify, a dangerous gap in international early warning systems is exposing millions to expected famines. New research by Chatham House discovers that food security considerations are comprehensively overlooked in disaster preparedness, as climate change creates a “never-before-experienced mix of risks” to global food supplies. This oversight comes at a lethal price in human life:673 million individuals went hungry in 2024, and Africa unfairly shouldered the burden; 307 million Africans went without food in just the one year alone.
The issue isn’t a lack of technology but an underlying failure to link climate information with food systems. While Bangladesh closely monitors monsoon regimes, it provides farmers with patchy information on how shifting weather will impact crops or soil salinity. In Senegal, where the average household devotes more than half their expenditure to food, early warning systems fail to account for the dynamic interactions between drought, wildfires, and locust infestations. As noted by report author Richard King, “The food security aspect tends to be an afterthought” when dangers propagate in unforeseen ways.
The statistics indicate systemic deficits: only 55% of countries have operational multihazard early warning systems, and with that, almost half the world’s population is not sufficiently protected. The deficit is particularly dangerous because climate change amplifies underlying exposures. The war in Ukraine demonstrated how war can trigger a global surge in food prices, and recurrent droughts, sometimes less targeted than unforeseen disasters such as floods, create glacial crises beyond rapid response horizons.
But solutions where systems function do exist. The World Food Program’s “anticipatory action” program, operating in 24 nations, demonstrates the power of anticipatory intervention. In Ethiopia’s drought-stricken regions, pre-emptive alerts combined with cash transfers kept 150,000 people from the disastrous loss of livestock this year alone. As WFP’s Robert Ackatia-Armah would say, “We cannot prevent the shock from happening, but we can prevent the humanitarian cost by intervening early on.” This kind of strategy is a paradigm shift away from reactive aid to proactive resilience construction.
The challenge now is to translate such subtle successes into inclusive global systems. Meteorological data, farm forecasts, market analysis, and vulnerability analysis must merge with effective early warnings. They must consider how climate shocks interact with conflict, trade disruptions, and economic shocks—the sophisticated risk mix that characterises modern food crises. Maybe most of all, they must reach out to smallholder farmers, who produce a third of the world’s food but may lack access to rudimentary weather data.
As record heat breaks and increasingly extreme weather becomes the norm, the margin for error in food security diminishes exponentially. The 20% of Africans currently hungry are not merely a humanitarian crisis but an indicator, in quantity, of impending system failure. Closing the early warning gap requires that we take food security seriously, not as an afterthought, but as the primary measure we use to determine whether we’re prepared for the climate challenges of the future. The technology exists; what we need is political will to connect the dots between changed clouds and empty plates.
