Global hunger rates have gone up for the third year in a row, and experts from the United Nations said that extreme weather was partially to blame, in a report released on Tuesday.
"The report sends a clear message that climate variability and exposure to more complex, frequent and intense climate extremes are threatening to erode and even reverse the gains made in ending hunger and malnutrition," the report's authors said, mentioning that the number of droughts, floods and other weather events have doubled since the early 1990s, the BBC reported.
The U.N. report covers 2017, and so does not take into account the record temperatures experienced in 2018.
"The extreme weather we have seen this year is likely to have exacerbated the crisis. A hotter world is proving to be a hungrier world. It is shocking that, after a prolonged decline, this is the third consecutive year of rising hunger," said Robin Willoughby, the head of food and climate policy at Oxfam GB, an affiliate of Oxfam International, a development organization that fights hunger and poverty on a global scale.
The report found that hunger affected one in nine people around the world, or 821 million people, in 2017. As temperatures increase and the changes in rainfall patterns continue, the underproduction of crops such as rice, wheat and corn will continue, the report warned.
"If we are to achieve a world without hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030, it is imperative that we accelerate and scale up actions to strengthen the resilience and adaptive capacity of food systems and people's livelihoods in response to climate variability and extremes," the leaders of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the U.N. Children's Fund, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization said in the report.
Children under the age of 5 are also experiencing the effects of malnutrition. Nearly 151 million children are too short for their age, 50.5 million are underweight and 38.3 million are overweight. Obesity is also on the rise—one in eight adults in the world is obese because of a lack of access to nutritious food.
Malnutrition due to food insecurity and accessibility is also being threatened by conflict and violence, the report noted.
The authors recommend that local and national governments "accelerate and scale up actions to strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate variability and extremes."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
