World hunger is rising for the first time in more than a decade, because of a combination of two things: climate change and war.

Over the past few years, our planet has witnessed a never-ending news coverage of floods, fires, refugees, and violence. Generally speaking, the world has become a bit less predictable and a bit more unstable. While these disasters are continuously competing for our attention in the media, they are having extremely grave effects on the lives of people living in marginalized and war-torn areas, by making world hunger worse.

How Climate Change is Making it Harder to Feed People

Between 1990 and 2015, principally owing to an assortment of comprehensive initiatives, the proportion of malnourished people in the world was decreased by 50%.

In 2015, U.N. countries adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which contributed to the success by setting out an ambitious goal to end hunger altogether by the year 2030. However, disappointingly, a recent U.N. report indicates that, after years of constant decline, world hunger is on the rise again.

The annual Global Food Security Index is tracking a country’s natural resource supply, and its resiliency in the event of a significant natural disaster. This year, to understand the impact of climate change on a country’s overall food security, the GFSI report has added a new indicator, that is called Natural Resource and Resilience Indicator (or Exposure Indicator). It measures the number of the challenges ahead on how countries would respond to the volatility produced by climate change. The Exposure Indicator measures two things: how sensitive national economies are to climate-related risks, and how equipped they are to deal with the uncertainties and adapt to them. What the new indicator is showing is that every country, to an extent, will have to readjust.

Climate Change and Conflict are Threatening Livelihoods in Rural Areas

Social and political volatility is on the rise globally. Since 2010, armed conflict within countries has increased by 125 percent since 2010. Identified by a U.N. report, more than half of the food-insecure population, 489 million out of 815 million to be exact, live in countries with ongoing violence. Moreover, more than three-quarters of the world’s undernourished children (122 million out of 155 million) live in conflict-ridden regions.

According to U.N. reporting the number of starving people was 777 million in 2015. Just one year later 815 million (11% of the world population) went hungry, this being the first increase in more than 15 years.

More than half of those starving in 2016, live in regions affected by conflicts, are simultaneously experiencing droughts, storms, floods, and other shocks associated with global client change.

These trends are not unrelated: communities suffering from conflict are more vulnerable to climate-related disasters, and likewise, crop failure caused by climate can contribute to social unrest.

War hits farmers hard. Conflict can destroy livestock, prevent them from acquiring seed and fertilizer or selling their produce, restrict their access to water and forage, disrupt planting or harvest cycles, and even evict them from their land.

Investing in New Strategies to Help Rural Livelihoods

In the past twenty years, the world has come together to fight hunger. This effort has produced innovations in agriculture, technology, and knowledge transfer. Now, however, the crises of violent conflict and a changing climate show that this approach is not enough. In most vulnerable areas in the world, food security depends not just on making agriculture more productive, but also on connecting rural livelihoods, and making them diverse and adaptable.

Rural populations need sustainable ways to support themselves in the face of crisis. Investing in strategies to help rural livelihoods that are resilient, diverse and interconnected, can reduce the world hunger in the long term.

The new report by the. U.N. shows that to reduce and ultimately eliminate hunger, only making agriculture more productive will not be enough. Also, it is crucial to increase the options available to rural populations in an uncertain world.

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