Our understanding of food security has fundamentally shifted in recent years with increasing recognition of the nutrition element embedded in the definition, precipitating improved monitoring indicators. The prior focus on undernourishment, primarily reflected in the Sustainable Development Goal indicator SDG 2.1.1, failed to capture the nutritional quality of food, which is now reflected in the cost of a healthy diet.

Climate change is eroding global food security, striking at its four foundational pillars: availability, accessibility, utilisation, and stability. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and heatwaves, are reducing crop yields, decimating livestock, depleting fish stocks, and shrinking food availability. Price surges, damaged infrastructure, and deepening social inequalities are hindering accessibility, making it harder for vulnerable populations to afford or access food. Climate driven health crises, like waterborne diseases, and food safety risks, such as increased pesticide use, impair utilisation, while volatile supplies and incomes destabilise food systems. The IPCC’s 2023 Synthesis Report warns that these impacts are already more severe than predicted, while climate change could push 100 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030 (Hallegatte et al., 2016) and exacerbate chronic hunger, with projections estimating up to 8

During the 2010s, food systems perspectives have become popular, because a (broad) systems perspective captures the many processes — see Figure A — that lead to the several and diverse outcomes usually demanded of food systems — food and nutrition security, reduction of poverty, reduced social inequality including gender equity, and environmental sustainability including adapting to and mitigating climate change (Brower et al., 2020).

The scope of our original task was extensive – including to: identify the causes of increasing food crises and unpack why food systems fail; scope out if and how social protection can enable stronger food systems; provide examples of where social protection approaches have been used to prevent and manage food crises; identify where and how a food crisis/food systems lens should be taken when building or strengthening social protection systems; explore what operational entry points there are for social protection to prevent and manage food crises; and propose what policy, coordination and design changes are needed to achieve this.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, food crises were considered rural crises: a rapid internet search reveals a notable lack of literature on urban food crises. Most people now live in urban settings, including in countries that are most vulnerable to crises. But are current approaches to addressing rural food crises adaptable to urban areas, or does urbanisation create a new challenge requiring a different response?