One in 11 people went hungry last year. Climate change is a big reason why.
Hunger and food insecurity are no longer merely benchmarks of public health. They are symptoms of a warming world.

Ayurella Horn-Muller Staff Writer
Published Jul 29, 2024

One in 11 people worldwide went hungry last year, while one in three struggled to afford a healthy diet. These numbers underscore the fact that governments not only have little shot at achieving a goal, set in 2015, of eradicating hunger, but progress toward expanding food access is backsliding.

The data, included in a United Nations report released Wednesday, also reveals something surprising: As global crises continue to deepen, issues like hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition no longer stand alone as isolated benchmarks of public health. In the eyes of the intergovernmental organizations and humanitarian institutions tracking these challenges, access to food is increasingly entangled with the impacts of a warming world.

“The agrifood system is working under risk and uncertainties, and these risks and uncertainties are being accelerated because of climate [change] and the frequency of climate events,” Máximo Torero Cullen, chief economist of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, said in a briefing. It is a “problem that will continue to increase,” he said, adding that the mounting effects of warming on global food systems create a human rights issue.

Torero calls the crisis “an unacceptable situation that we cannot afford, both in terms of our society, in terms of our moral beliefs, but also in terms of our economic returns.”

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