Sea levels are rising, deserts are growing and farmable land is shrinking. There is too much or too little rain. Floods, storms and droughts destroy land and livestock. For poor families, even small weather fluctuations can be catastrophic. Subsistence farmers lose their source of food and income. Children are pulled out of school to save money. Entire towns lose their livelihoods or even their lives. People resort to drastic measures to survive, like eating less or low-quality food or selling the very things they rely on, like animals, equipment and land.
If global temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius, it could push 189 million more people into hunger. How can we help people overcome this life-threatening combination? It’s perhaps one of the most pressing questions of our generation.
We have the power to turn this ship around, and WFP is at the wheel.
1. Forecast-Based Financing
Forecast-based financing, i.e. the financing of aid measures based on climate forecasts, is a fancy way of saying: the earlier WFP responds to risk, the better and more effective the response is. For example, in the event of a flood, food and farming equipment needs to be stored in a safe place. If forecasts indicate that a flood is likely, the food and equipment can be moved even before the rain begins. This reduces both the cost of aid and the negative impacts of the event.
In a remarkable pilot project in Nepal, forecast-based financing reduced the cost of emergency aid for 175,000 people in flood-prone areas from $32 million to only $10 million. How? The flood alert reached people 15 days ahead of time, instead of the usual five hours. Emergency relief arrived faster because the infrastructure was still intact.
2. Insurance
Ninety percent of all-natural disasters come in the form of floods, storms or droughts. But for most people in poor, rural communities, there’s no such thing as homeowners insurance. WFP is changing that. The R4 Rural Resilience Initiative — or R4 — provides climate risk insurance to small-scale farmers in exchange for their participation in building community assets.
In 2018, WFP insured 6,000 farmers across six African countries, reaching a value of $10.3 million dollars.
3. Sustainable Farming
Since the early 1990s, the frequency of extreme weather events has doubled. One of the cruelest ironies of climate change and hunger is its disproportionate impact on small-scale farmers—the very people who grow food to survive. Subsistence farmers often have little knowledge about sustainable agricultural practices, such as soil preservation or water conservation. WFP helps increase communities’ knowledge about these techniques, like how to use fewer chemicals, plant drought-resistant crops, store water and rotate fields.
4. Better Packaging
Packaging is an inevitable part of WFP’s work. Delivering food to millions of people around the world requires millions of boxes, bags and jugs. In order to reduce the environmental impact of all those containers, WFP focuses on the three R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. For example, WFP has adjusted its packaging to fit more food in smaller containers and limited the use of package colors to reduce the use of ink.
5. Foods to Prevent Environmental Degradation
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the degradation of natural resources is an inevitable consequence of the influx of many people to the same place. Today, 80 percent of all hungry people live in places that are highly prone to extreme weather, so we can expect more and more people to move to new places because of natural disasters. When WFP provides food, shelter and cooking supplies to migrants and refugees, they can satisfy their nutritional needs without damaging the environment. In this way, food distribution indirectly prevents environmental degradation.
6. Promoting Local Producers
WFP has turned its vast food needs into a benefit for local food producers. WFP uses its purchasing power to connect small producers with regional markets through several programs: Purchase for Progress, Farm-to-Market Alliance and Home Grown School Feeding. Each of these initiatives has numerous environmental benefits that come from the same basic principal: Using locally-grown food means less pollution from long-distance transportation, including fewer greenhouse gas emissions, which is a huge benefit to the environment. In 2018, WFP purchased food valued at more than $31 million dollars from small-scale farmers across 29 countries.
WFP is doing everything it can to help vulnerable people withstand climate change.
Original source: WFP
Published on 24 July 2019
