Early-warning systems offer a proven method of reducing food insecurity, but the current patchwork of mechanisms, governance and cooperation is not fit for purpose. Improvement of these systems requires shareable and interoperable data, agreements on ownership of risks, and pooled funding that is not reliant on a single source.
Our recommendations centre on three areas:
- Strengthening the governance mechanisms of early-warning systems and anticipatory actions related to food security.
- Improving the understanding of, and responses to, cascading risks to food systems and the food security of at-risk communities.
- Strengthening anticipatory action plans at subnational and national levels.
These are further distilled for actors operating at international, regional, national and subnational levels (see Table 1 for a list of actors at each level).
Strengthening the governance of food security early-warning systems and anticipatory actions
The cross-border cascading impacts of many food crises, such as increased refugee flows, social unrest and trade disruptions, means shared governance should be a common interest, to prevent adverse economic and social impacts domestically and internationally. Governance mechanisms, including system frameworks, clear roles and responsibilities, and standard operating procedures for early-warning systems (FEWS NET, GIEWS, AMIS, etc.), need to be developed in a way that engenders multi-level coordination and collaboration across global, regional, national and subnational levels. Such mechanisms should be founded on interdisciplinary understandings of food systems. Food security considerations should inform joined-up approaches to early action, recovery and preparedness plans, and food security coordination should be integrated into disaster risk reduction frameworks that countries already support.
International level
1. Ensure adequacy of funding and build longer-term finance resilience:
The current model of anticipatory action funding, characterized by precarious short-term donor cycles and reactive responses, requires fundamental restructuring to achieve sustainable impact. Governments must shift from dependency on external humanitarian funding towards building indigenous capacity for early action and resilient agri-food systems. This transition necessitates strategic partnerships between national governments, climate finance institutions and disaster risk management actors to develop comprehensive financing strategies that integrate climate adaptation, disaster preparedness and anticipatory action in unified frameworks.
2. Make data from different communities interoperable:
Food systems intelligence related to areas such as market dynamics, climate risk, conflict indicators and health–nutrition linkages should be more thoroughly integrated by actors operating existing global early-warning systems.
- Data on these dynamics produced in line with Pillar 2 by food security forecasters should inform regularly updated risk scenarios on emerging drivers of food insecurity for use by regional or national government and civil society actors responsible for Pillar 3 and 4 implementation.
- International forecasters, researchers and international food-security focused institutions under Pillar 1 should share data- and scenario-driven information on complex risks and work with early-warning system actors to build this understanding into existing or emerging early-warning systems. This would enable the data and early-warning systems to be used more strategically to inform timely and coordinated action under Pillar 4 and beyond to anticipate, prevent and mitigate systemic and multi-modal food system risks.
3. Integrate mandates of existing systems and initiatives forecasting food security impacts:
Working through the existing coordination mechanisms of the Global Network for Food Crises, or a similar body, an operational working group comprised of food security experts and early-warning system actors should seek to improve the integration of systems and initiatives – such as FEWS NET, VAM and AMIS Market Monitor (See Annex 1). This type of initiative could support better communication (Pillar 3) and informed decision-making, enable more integrated and comprehensive real-time risk assessments, and improve links between global market monitoring and acute food insecurity warning systems.
- To support this, data-sharing agreements and interoperable data standards should be established by early-warning information producers, humanitarian actors and government authorities – with clear ownership and permissive data infrastructure and access rights – to ensure efficient data production and exchange between international organizations, across sectors (e.g. food security, conflict, disaster risks etc.), and between international, regional and national actors under Pillar 2.
4. Enhance the profile of cascading risks in food security early-warning
systems and anticipatory governance:88
- Better coherence, coordination and sustainable financing are needed to prioritize and invest in early-warning systems that consider cascading risks to food security and that strengthen risk reduction, recovery and preparedness. This could include:
- Governments establishing contingency (risk reduction) funding pots at national level and utilizing international climate adaptation funds, such as the Loss and Damage Fund, for building early-warning systems.
- Donors allocating grants to ‘missing voices’.
- Civil society organizations (CSOs) leveraging anticipatory action funding under Pillar 4, to ensure sustained support for preparedness, response and resilience-building. They should equally monitor and advocate for allocations and disbursements that measure up to the $3.1 billion estimated minimum need across all four pillars between 2023 and 2027, as identified by the Early Warnings for All Executive Action Plan.
- Improved collaboration between donors, government, CSOs and the research community to boost understanding of how and when to use varying financing tools to best ensure coherence, coordination and sustainability of multi-risk early-warning mechanisms.
Regional level
5. Leverage and invest in existing national and subnational networks, alongside scientific forecasting or monitoring capabilities:
- Donors and governments should invest, via climate adaptation and disaster response funding, in regional hydrometeorological bodies (such as the Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System (RIMES) in Africa and Asia).
- Such regional entities should be empowered to improve harmonization of data and shared understandings of risk, incorporating perspectives from global and national actors. This could be achieved by facilitating dialogue and coordination between global and national entities that have differing perspectives, outlooks, data and capacities, to support inter-country collaborations on early-warning systems that consider cascading risks to food security beyond national borders.
National level
6. Improve representation of food security and multi-hazard risk experts across early-warning and disaster response planning, clarifying who owns the risks and how anticipatory responses will be funded:
- Comprehensive, multisectoral governance approaches to early-warning systems should be established. To achieve this, national governments should ensure policies, procedures and organizational structures:
- Support, incentivize and mandate ongoing coordination between hydrometeorological services, disaster preparedness agencies, humanitarian actors and key ministries such as agriculture, health, trade and bureaus of statistics.
- Focus on integrating community perspectives and their needs and capacities to receive, understand and act on timely information related to potential food insecurity (Pillar 3 and Pillar 4).
- Include ‘missing voices’ in social protection schemes to enable sufficient and contextually appropriate support is provided to marginalized populations before and after adverse disaster impacts.
- Build on insights, data and recommendations from CSOs with established relationships and connections to local communities at risk from food insecurity. National governments and such CSOs should work together closely to collaboratively improve early-warning systems.
- National governments should clarify risk ownership for cascading food security threats by assigning responsibility to a central authority with high-level expertise (e.g. the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the US) that is empowered to coordinate across sectors, central government ministries and administrative boundaries.
- The mandated lead for food security within national government should standardize monitoring (Pillar 2) and coordination of food security risks across all four dimensions of food security – availability, access, utilization and stability – to replace fragmented, supply-focused approaches.
Improving the understanding of and response to cascading risks to food systems and community food security
To deliver on more comprehensive early-warning systems, technical coordination on improving ways to pre-empt cascading risks is crucial. Those responsible for providing early-warning data under Pillar 2, and government, media and CSOs with a formal mandate to communicate alerts under Pillar 3 and to act under Pillar 4, need to ensure that the information produced is understandable, focused on the potential negative impacts of cascading risks, and that it supports early-action decision-making at appropriate points in a risk cascade. Producing actionable knowledge capable of mitigating harmful cascading impacts requires drawing on and harmonizing disparate sources of information about complex risk morphology, existing response frameworks and contextual vulnerabilities, specifically with regard to food security outcomes.
Regional and national levels
1. Facilitate – and invest – in the transfer and building of knowledge between regional and national experts, ensuring community-centred approaches to strengthen their food system resilience:
- Regional early-warning system entities should take the lead in setting Pillar 1 and 2 data standards in their regions, support inter-county data-sharing platforms, downscale global food security forecast information to support communication and understanding of risks (Pillar 3), and upskill national actors on cascading risk dynamics.
- Government agencies need to integrate monitoring of key drivers of food insecurity and their real-time interactions with natural hazards given the significant food security risks across all disaster types.
- To do so, Pillar 1 and 2 government actors need to ensure food security risk indicators are contextually appropriate and disaggregated for population cohorts with different characteristics – for example, age, gender, disability – that may increase their vulnerability.
- Food security experts, and government actors responsible for early-warning system monitoring under Pillar 2 should work together to standardize existing indicators as far as possible, and gaps should be plugged by qualitative or quantitative information from community monitoring, working with local government and civil society actors.
- Government actors responsible for Pillar 1 should ensure that the datasets and clear diagnoses of cohort resilience transparently inform and support decision-making processes relating to early action, response and recovery under Pillar 4. Food security forecasters should work with regional centres and national mandated early-warning actors and Pillar 4 user groups to work towards impact-based forecasting to unlock more informed, localized risk information and clear communication content that incorporates risks cascading in multiple ways with differential impacts on different cohorts.
- Food security forecasters and national government and CSOs should share information to strengthen impact-based forecasting.
- Researchers, CSOs and government actors should work together to conduct transdisciplinary risk assessments (such as those outlined in the UK’s National Risk Register) for local food systems, strengthening understanding of relevant risk factors and hazard interaction characteristics.
- Regional bodies and local actors should share their knowledge and learning and evaluations of the efficacy of existing early-warning systems and early-action protocols during previous risk episodes.
- Donors and government actors (disaster risk management authorities) should invest in food security post-event evaluations, including assessment of the early warning value chain and implementation of early action protocols.
Strengthening subnational and national anticipatory action plans
Early action on food security hinges on the capacity for early warnings to reach at-risk communities that remain in a perpetual cycle of hunger and food insecurity. More support is needed for communities most affected by cascading risks to their food security. This can be achieved through improved stakeholder recognition of responsibilities under pillars 1, 2 and 3 as well as ownership of producing early-warning information that supports Pillar 4 decision-making and actions; investment to integrate cascading risks into early-warning systems and holistic financing of effective systems; and institutional management and coordination across sectors, scales and stakeholders.
National and regional Pillar 1, 2 and 3 partners should provide more detailed and reliable information to support more informed community-based early-warning systems that enable earlier and deeper understanding of macro risk factors and dynamics through local to global level coordination – from developing food security risk knowledge through to response capacities, preset knowledge sharing protocols and coherent financing strategies. Equally, early-warning systems at national and regional levels should better incorporate community knowledge of particular vulnerabilities and constraints to taking anticipatory action.
International level
1. Build sustainable financing strategies and complementarity with blended climate finance:
- Supported by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Grand Bargain Caucus’ findings, donors and advanced economies, working with national governments responsible for early-warning systems, should co-develop, test and implement sustainable and diverse financing strategies by identifying and bridging existing shortfalls to scale up and support the longevity of communication protocols under Pillar 3, as well as decision-making functions and preparedness plans under Pillar 4 for cascading risks.
- Seek complementarities with broader financing mechanisms, particularly through innovative risk-sharing arrangements to de-risk investment in early-warning systems and preparedness infrastructure, such as with the Green Climate Fund. Opportunities to partner with the insurance industry or other private finance to provide additional capital and risk transfer mechanisms should also be explored.
Regional level
2. Co-develop indicators based on community and technical food system early-warning risk knowledge, design communication tools for complex risks:
- Regional intergovernmental bodies with a focus on early warning (such as RIMES and AGRHYMET) should engage with national and subnational governments to ensure multi-hazard food security-related early-warning communications, under Pillar 3, reflect multi-risk dynamics, including examples of previous transboundary risk cascades assessed under Pillar 1. Regional intergovernmental bodies with a focus on early warning should work with subnational Pillar 2 forecast providers to co-develop food security early-warning indicators and plans under Pillar 4 that respond to local needs and priorities. Where quantitative thresholds for activating pre-arranged and pre-financed actions are not viable due to context-specific or cascading dynamics, qualitative benchmarks should be established and incorporated into monitoring frameworks. These qualitative assessments should complement quantitative measures to permit more context-appropriate, flexible and inclusive early actions to be taken.
National level
3. Develop integrated tools and frameworks to monitor evolving risk cascades, ensuring this information is used alongside forecasting for pre-empting communication and preparedness plans:
- National forecasting agencies and disaster preparedness agencies should conduct integrated risk analyses of local food systems at scale, albeit contingent on funding and effective governance, under Pillar 1, identifying potential risk transmission dynamics (illustrated in Figure 1), to understand how transboundary risks may cascade and cause context-specific impacts locally.
- Working with local government and civil society actors, national government entities should build on the improved understanding of food insecurity impact time frames and cohort vulnerabilities, to co-develop better targeted communication and dissemination strategies under Pillar 3 and appropriate response archetypes under Pillar 4, strengthening connectivity between technical early-warning stakeholders and communities at risk.
- National governments should embed early-warning systems and anticipatory action within national strategies on climate adaptation or disaster policy frameworks. This should improve the sustainability of financing such systems and actions and should support mainstreaming anticipatory approaches related to food security across ministries and operational actors.
Subnational level
4. Cascading risks are felt by communities first and foremost. Developing ways of understanding how these impacts are felt requires a stronger subnational onus for implementation, but this is impacted by limited funding at this level.
- Subnational authorities and civil society actors should support community leaders or community preparedness volunteers to engage with specific communities at risk of food insecurity to improve actions under Pillars 3 and 4. This should focus on understanding barriers to accessing early-warning information, issues related to understanding technical forecast information, the cohorts of people most likely to be excluded from developing early-action plans, and those that require additional support to implement early actions to reduce risks of food insecurity.
- Civil society and local government should include local understanding of gaps in the early-warning system (related to cascading risks to food security) and the needs of local communities into plans and strategies at national and higher levels.
- Subnational authorities should be adequately resourced and trained to embed existing community perspectives and practices, including those from ‘missing voices’ into early action or disaster preparedness plans. Doing so should ensure that such plans complement and support existing community response strategies under Pillar 4 and that food system risk assessments under Pillar 1 reflect varied experiences of vulnerability. This requires concerted engagement with, and willingness to learn from, NGOs, civil society and community representatives.
