As geopolitical and environmental turbulence intensifies, a new, systemic approach to food security is critical. Early-warning systems that anticipate multiple and cascading risks can reduce food insecurity and build greater resilience.
Food systems are complex, globally interconnected arrangements. The nature of them increases the exposure of communities to transboundary cascading and compound risks – making negative impacts more likely as localized shocks have the potential to develop into international crises. Addressing food insecurity requires coordinated, systemic responses that tackle the four components of food security: access, availability, utilization and stability.
More broadly, anticipatory action has tangible benefits in reducing direct impacts and response costs of discrete hazard events. Many warning systems are designed around single hazards and are limited in geographic scale. Such warning systems often react to the final risk experienced by communities, underestimating upstream drivers and transmission risk mechanisms in global food systems. Yet the nature of risks to food security is increasingly complex, intersecting and amplified through cascading and compounding dynamics. These risks and dynamics are occurring in contexts of pronounced environmental, geopolitical and economic turbulence due to greater multipolarity, contestation and securitization of food supply chains. Developing and deploying early-warning systems that facilitate anticipation of such indirect and cascading risks to food security is essential to build resilience to the multidimensional and dynamic nature of impacts on local food systems.
In terms of risk knowledge (Pillar 1 of the EW4All initiative), the humanitarian sector is making progress in recognizing, understanding and advancing anticipatory approaches based on early-warning systems that are cognizant of multi-hazard and multi-risk contexts. With regard to food security risks, many humanitarian actors are using both acute food insecurity and market monitoring mechanisms but often combining these in piecemeal ways rather than using them in a more comprehensive way to support decision-making. Knowledge of cascading risks is also advancing further upstream in the disaster risk reduction life cycle (see Figure 3). For example, more countries are beginning to understand, assess and consider cascading risks in their national climate adaptation plans, however, there is still limited progress in the use of anticipatory action to support early-warning systems.
Regarding detection, monitoring and forecasting (Pillar 2), the fractured nature of approaches to these activities reflects, to a large degree, a fragmented institutional environment and underlying financing constraints. Operationally, this combination limits the ability of even multi-hazard and multi-risk-orientated early-warning systems to identify and monitor the plethora of risk cascades that affect food security outcomes. State actors rarely adopt a multi-risk outlook, resulting in a siloed approach – especially at national levels – to predominantly hydrometeorological hazard monitoring, with insufficient regard to the food security impacts of these and other risks. Among early-warning systems focused on food security, there is a disconnect between on the one hand, monitoring local exposures and vulnerabilities to dislocations in food access and availability, and on the other, tracking and forecasting cross-border risk cascades upstream of community impacts. With FEWS NET temporarily shuttered, and with an uncertain future, due to the US official development assistance freeze, the challenges with monitoring even relatively direct risks to food security have recently deepened. This is further constraining the capacity to forecast more complex risk confluences. At the same time, there is the prospect for increasing the efficacy of tracking complex and systemic food security risks through technological advances and the nascent application of artificial intelligence to modelling and monitoring food insecurity. Ensuring that such technology-augmented approaches stay people-centred and responsive to the varied structural forms of food insecurity and social exclusion will be key to making them fit for purpose.
With respect to warning dissemination and communication (Pillar 3), timely actionable alerts for indirect, compound and cascading food system risks are stymied in many instances by underlying deficiencies in risk knowledge and forecasting. Challenges abound even in communicating more direct risks about food- and non-food-related risks to stakeholders with the capacity to act. Distilling complex terminologies for risk transmission dynamics into representative case studies that are localized and contextualized will aid a greater understanding of linear and non-linear impacts to food security. Strengthened risk communication requires thinking beyond coverage of disseminated data to consider more targeted, actionable risk messaging. Localizing early-warning dissemination channels is also important, with contextual grounding that considers socio-behavioural dimensions, marginalized access, poor understanding of data or gaps in coordination. To determine end-to-end connectivity, an analysis of how dissemination channels reach populations is needed. Communication protocols need greater impetus to put communities at the centre of objectives, understanding their needs by building on food security outcome indicators and stress-testing into national monitoring mechanisms.
In terms of better preparedness and response (Pillar 4), early-warning systems can be utilized at multiple stages of a cascading risk timeline, as illustrated by the response typologies shown in Figure 3. For example, appropriately designed early-warning systems can enable responses that block cascading impacts before they reach vulnerable populations by focusing on the forecast-hazard-impact time frame. Early-warning systems may also enable domestic adaptation whereby impacts are absorbed within an affected population by reducing the vulnerabilities of local food production, supply and storage systems and by increasing communities’ underlying resilience. Other response types, such as adaptation at origin, adaptation within the transmission system and system-wide adaptation, can be used for disaster risk management to adapt, prevent and mitigate adverse effects of external shocks on food systems. Key stakeholders will be disaster preparedness, climate resilience and mitigation or civil contingency expertise. Social protection expertise can cut across any of these response types.
Disbursement of pre-arranged finance remains a critical gap in timely crisis response, even with more advanced early-warning systems. These systems require discretionary financial contributions from donors, and operational delays persist due to insufficient funding and coordination. Dialogue mechanisms – such as AMIS’s Rapid Response Forum – are essential for engaging globally significant stakeholders, including G20 member countries, to address disruptions in key food commodities like wheat, maize, rice and soybeans. These forums can influence global policymaking and elevate food security concerns. However, their impact is limited by narrow mandates, financial constraints and uneven country engagement. Integrating agricultural market monitoring with acute food insecurity tracking can better align global systems with local realities. This will strengthen the link between global supply chain insights and subnational food and nutrition data, enabling more timely and effective responses to mitigate food insecurity.
Not only does considering early-warning alongside other risk-reduction measures help to strengthen preparedness and aid cross-functionality of early-warning systems for resilience, disaster risk reduction and anticipatory action, such an approach also helps to identify opportunities to fund and upscale longer-term resilience-building tools. Conceptualizing early-warning systems and hazard response in this way may aid policy coherence in two ways: first, by accommodating complementary response typologies in different plans and policies (e.g. National Adaptation Plans, Disaster Risk Management, Anticipatory Action Protocols) to ensure better consistency across response frameworks; and second, by identifying opportunities to increase coordination between sectors through the joint involvement or targeting of stakeholders across different cascading risk response archetypes.
Food system risks are wide-ranging in nature: from those that are proximal and direct to those that are transboundary and indirect, from those that are rapid-onset with clear transmission pathways to those that are insidious, and which develop complex risk interaction and propagation dynamics. By taking a more systemic approach to all these types of risks, early-warning systems can enable actions that reduce food insecurity. By embedding these approaches within other disaster risk reduction approaches, such as adaptation and social protection programming, systemically focused early-warning systems could also contribute to building greater systemic resilience, potentially at multiple points within the risk transmission system. Considering existing investment shortfalls, there is a need to diversify financial and policy instruments with a clear demarcation of risk ownership for different stages of a risk cascade based on the food-security context and multiple overlapping risks. The cost-effectiveness of acting prior to an impact is well understood in the early-warning context, but less analysis focuses on how early-warning mechanisms can reduce the investment required to reduce risks at scale in multi-hazard contexts by intervening at earlier stages of risk cascades.
