Climate Change

Three consecutive years of progress in reducing global hunger demonstrate that hunger is not inevitable, the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), QU Dongyu, said Tuesday at the launch of the 2026 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report.According to the SOFI report, an estimated 645 million people (7.8 percent of the global population) faced hunger in 2025. This represents nearly 14 million fewer people than in 2024 and 43 million fewer than at the 2022 peak.Food insecurity also improved substantially.

Over the past 10 years, food and nutrition crises have shifted from one-off emergencies to protracted conditions in many regions around the world, according to the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) released today. Since 2016, the global share of people facing acute food insecurity has nearly doubled. In 2025, 266 million people across 47 countries/territories experienced acute food insecurity; what’s more, 33 of those countries have appeared in every GRFC edition released since the report’s inception in 2016.

A new alert from IPC reports that over 5.83 million Haitians—more than half the country’s population—will experience acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) by June 2026. That includes almost 1.9 million people in emergency levels of food insecurity. While these numbers show evidence of slight improvement from IPC estimates published in September 2025, the latest alert emphasizes that these improvements are highly localized.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) stands as a vital supplier to the global food system, yet its agricultural sector faces intensified disruptions from rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns. In their book chapter on “Adapting to a Changing Climate: Strategies for Productive and Resilient Agrifood Systems” the authors looked at how factors like yield shocks, water constraints, and heat stress introduce new push-and-pull forces that alter crop viability and regional advantages.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts is a core element of global agrifood system transformation. Yet, while it represents an important opportunity for capital markets and investors, climate finance focused on agrifood systems has thus far been limited. In 2022, $95 billion of global climate finance funding was dedicated to agrifood industries and practices, with 22% coming from private sources.