Editing IPCC:AR6/SRCCL/Chapter-5 (section)

==== 5.1.1.1 Food security as an outcome of the food system ====

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The activities and the actors in the food system lead to outcomes such as food security and generate impacts on the environment. As part of the environmental impacts, food systems are a considerable contributor to GHG emissions, and thus climate change (Section 5.4). In turn, climate change has complex interactions with food systems, leading to food insecurity through impacts on food availability, access, utilisation and stability (Table 5.1 and Section 5.2).

We take a '''food systems lens''' in the Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) to recognise that demand for and supply of food are interlinked and need to be jointly assessed in order to identify the challenges of mitigation and adaptation to climate change. Outcomes cannot be disaggregated solely to, for example, agricultural production, because the demand for food shapes what is grown, where it is grown, and how much is grown. Thus, GHG emissions from agriculture result, in large part, from ‘pull’ from the demand side. Mitigation and adaptation involve modifying production, supply chain, and demand practices (through, for example, dietary choices, market incentives, and trade relationships), so as to evolve to a more sustainable and healthy food system.

According to FAO (2001a) <sup>[[#fn:r3|3]]</sup> , '''food security''' is a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. ‘All people at all times’ implies the need for equitable and stable food distribution, but it is increasingly recognised that it also covers the need for inter-generational equity, and therefore ‘sustainability’ in food production. ‘Safe and nutritious food … for a healthy life’ implies that food insecurity can occur if the diet is not nutritious, including when there is consumption of an excess of calories, or if food is not safe, meaning free from harmful substances.

A prime impact of food insecurity is '''malnourishmen''' t (literally ‘bad nourishment’) leading to '''malnutrition''' , which refers to deficiencies, excesses, or imbalances in a person’s intake of energy and/or nutrients. As defined by FAO et al. (2018) <sup>[[#fn:r1410|1410]]</sup> , undernourishment occurs when an individual’s habitual food consumption is insufficient to provide the amount of dietary energy required to maintain a normal, active, healthy life. In addition to undernourishment in the sense of insufficient calories (‘hunger’), undernourishment occurs in terms of nutritional deficiencies in vitamins (e.g., vitamin A) and minerals (e.g., iron, zinc, iodine), so-called ‘hidden hunger’. Hidden hunger tends to be present in countries with high levels of undernourishment (Muthayya et al. 2013 <sup>[[#fn:r4|4]]</sup> ), but micronutrient deficiency can occur in societies with low prevalence of undernourishment. For example, in many parts of the world teenage girls suffer from iron deficiency (Whitfield et al. 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r5|5]]</sup> and calcium deficiency is common in Western-style diets (Aslam and Varani 2016 <sup>[[#fn:r6|6]]</sup> ). Food security is related to nutrition, and conversely food insecurity is related to malnutrition. Not all malnourishment arises from food insecurity, as households may have access to healthy diets but choose to eat unhealthily, or it may arise from illness. However, in many parts of the world, poverty is linked to poor diets (FAO et al. 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r7|7]]</sup> ). This may be through lack of resources to produce or access food in general, or healthy food, in particular, as healthier diets are more expensive than diets rich in calories but poor in nutrition ( ''high confidence'' ) (see meta-analysis by Darmon and Drewnowski 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r8|8]]</sup> ). The relationship between poverty and poor diets may also be linked to unhealthy ‘food environments,’ with retail outlets in a locality only providing access to foods of low nutritional quality (Gamba et al. 2015) – such areas are sometimes termed ‘food deserts’ (Battersby 2012 <sup>[[#fn:r9|9]]</sup> ).

Whilst conceptually the definition of food security is clear, it is not straightforward to measure in a simple way that encompasses all its aspects. Although there are a range of methods to assess food insecurity, they all have some shortcomings. For example, the FAO has developed the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), a survey-based tool to measure the severity of overall households’ inability to access food. While it provides reliable estimates of the prevalence of food insecurity in a population, it does not reveal whether actual diets are adequate or not with respect to all aspects of nutrition (Section 5.1.2.1).

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