Predicting urban food insecurity under climate change in Brazilian Amazonia

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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.