Predicting urban food insecurity under climate change in Brazilian Amazonia

The ultimate goal of climate policy is to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, this is a strategy with decadal or centurial timescales. An equally important and more urgent concern is to reduce the impacts of climate change by improving the adaptive capacity of poor, marginalized populations to severe weather events such as droughts and floods. Extreme events such as floods and droughts cause significant economic losses, and threaten human health and food security. Droughts probably have the greatest negative impacts in regions such as the Amazon, where river transport is the main way of distributing food. For example, Amazon droughts in 2005 and 2010 disrupted food distribution and led to dozens of deaths from malnutrition and declarations of state of emergency. Increased journey times and transport problems leads to higher food prices. When food prices are high, poorest families suffer most and lack access to adequate food and nutrition. The danger that droughts pose to food security in these regions will increase in the future because of climate change causing reduced rainfall, which leads to lower river levels. This project will develop a computer-based tool for predicting where and when food security of city-dwellers will be threatened by droughts, because of higher food prices. The tool will be based on data that we collect in small cities in the Amazon, including prices of important foods (meat and rice, for example). We will also use a series of questions to establish whether urban families have sufficient access to nutritious and affordable food. We will combine this information with information on river levels and poverty distribution across the whole Amazon (collected by the Brazilian government) and analyze data using statistical techniques normally used to predict disease outbreaks. The outcome of this analysis will be a tool that can generate maps to show the level of Food Security Risk for each of the hundreds of municipalities in the Amazon. This will help the Brazilian government to be strategic and invest their resources in the cities that are predicted to have most people suffering from malnutrition during droughts.

Who will benefit from this research? Understanding how climate change and poverty interact to cause food insecurity in developing countries provides vital information for reducing the negative impacts of environmental change. Owing to its novel, topical and applied nature, this research will bring significant benefits to the academic community, governments and the public in UK, Brazil and elsewhere.
How will these groups benefit? 1. Academia: This research will advance the role of quantitative social science as means of understanding major global challenges and developing solutions. This research will generate significant excitement and interest in academic communities, including climate change science, natural hazards research, global environmental change, food security and development studies. Results will be delivered to the scientific community through high-impact publications and conference presentations. Brazilian academia will benefit from cross-disciplinary collaborations (e.g. health sciences and space science) and building new links between partner institutions in Amazonia (e.g. Federal University of Pará) and the dominant South-East of Brazil (e.g. IPEA).
2. Governments: The UK government is actively seeking to advance global efforts to understand and tackle climate change and food insecurity. The proposed research would provide novel evidence for predicting vulnerability to climate change and extreme climatic events. We will maximise the potential benefits of this research to the UK government by preparing a policy brief or Parliamentary PostNote and liaising with the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FAO). This research will also provide substantial benefits to various levels of government in Brazil, facilitated by close engagement with relevant agencies throughout the research process. This will maximise the potential benefits and adoption of the predictive food insecurity tool to aid planning and disaster response. This would provide the Brazilian government with access to an evidence-based system for strategic investment in adaptive capacity for areas with the greatest vulnerability, and increased ability to intervene effectively during disasters in distribution of resources (e.g. food, fuel, healthcare). In addition to meetings with federal institutions (National Water Agency (ANA); Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA); National Secretariat of Civil Defence (Defesa Civil), Ministry of Health (FUNASA), the PI will develop a policy briefing at the end of the project. Scientists within key Brazilian institutions (National Institute of Space Research (INPE), health research agency, FioCruz) will directly benefit through the sharing of model code (done in open-access R) during the research process.
3. The public: The dissemination plan for this research will help to increase general understanding about climate adaptation and food insecurity. I will engage with the public in Lancashire using presentations in schools and community events, including through the work of admissions tutors for undergraduate programmes in the Lancaster Environment Centre. In Brazil, this research will provide a voice to those normally invisible during emergencies, where top-down approaches have been dominant. Workshops will provide new opportunities for dialogue between stakeholders and will highlight ways to maximise the impact for users of the proposed online map-based early warning system to illustrate municipality-scale vulnerability to food insecurity during droughts. Many Brazilians know little about Amazonia, and I will promote understanding of drought impacts on urban food insecurity in the region by disseminating research results to national media.