Food security crises are too often framed as forecasting failures, on the assumption that better satellite data, sharper models, or earlier warnings would have changed the outcome. However, while this can be true, a growing body of evidence tells a more uncomfortable story that food-security deterioration is often observed accurately and with enough lead time to act, but the response arrives too late to curb the crisis.
Earth observation, climate forecasts, market monitoring, conflict indicators, and citizen-generated data have made early detection of agricultural stress more possible than at almost any point in history, yet acute food insecurity continues to be addressed as an emergency rather than as manageable stress. This is not only an anticipation problem, but also an action problem, and the two should not be conflated.
National systems often lack the pre-agreed triggers to define when a threshold has been crossed, the financing to move resources before a crisis is formally declared, and the institutional confidence to act on a probability rather than wait for certainty. But climate-resilient food systems cannot be built on improved anticipation alone. They require closing the space between signal and response, including the triggers, financing, and political will that turn an early warning into a timely, reliable intervention. Until that link is fixed, sharper foresight will keep producing better-documented crises rather than fewer of them.
Signal found; crisis not averted
Food-security crises rarely begin on the day they are declared. Long before hunger reaches emergency levels, a sequence of changes is usually already underway. Rainfall fails or arrives late, rivers and reservoirs recede, pasture and soil moisture deteriorate, crops come under heat and water stress, staple prices rise, conflict constrains mobility and market access, and vulnerable households begin exhausting savings, selling productive assets, or eating less and eating worse.
Each signal can look manageable in isolation. When considered holistically, they can reveal something far more consequential, potentially indicative of a food system moving toward crisis. The World Food Programme’s 2026 Global Report on Food Crises estimates that 266 million people across 47 countries and territories experienced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025 – 22.9% of the population analysed – a share still nearly twice what it was in 2016.¹ Famine was confirmed in parts of both Gaza and Sudan that year, the first time the report has recorded two separate famines in the same 12 months.¹
Climate change is adding a further layer of instability. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with high confidence that climate-related extremes had already reduced the productivity of agriculture and fisheries, and that droughts, floods, and heat extremes are contributing to production losses, price spikes, and disrupted livelihoods.² Rather than acting as a standalone cause of hunger, climate change increasingly functions as a risk multiplier which compounds poverty, conflict, weak institutions, market disruption, and competition over land and water.²
Introspectively, one question deserves keen attention: are food crises catching the world by surprise, or is the world failing to connect the available signals to action soon enough? This matters because the next frontier in food-security intervention is not perfect predictions or signals. It is actionable foresight, with enough confidence about an emerging risk early enough to justify a consequential decision before food security deterioration becomes an emergency.
The crisis is often the end of the story, not the beginning
Food insecurity is typically measured through outcomes such as whether households can obtain enough food, whether diets are deteriorating, whether acute malnutrition is rising, or whether families have resorted to damaging coping strategies. Although these indicators are crucial, by the time several of them become severe, most of the underlying shock has already unfolded.
For example, in a drought-dependent agricultural economy, below-average rainfall first shows up as a meteorological anomaly. If it persists, it becomes a hydrological and agricultural problem, including decline in soil moisture, failure in crop establishment, poor pasture quality, and water scarcity. Consequently, expected yields reduce, livestock productivity weakens, and traders anticipate tightened food commodity supply. These events invariably trigger an increase in food prices, while farm and pastoral incomes fall. Households that normally grow part of their own food may become more dependent on already volatile markets.
Given that agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, a shock to water availability rarely stays contained to farming. It sequentially manifests in incomes, prices, and diets.³ In reality, the eventual food-security emergency is rarely a discrete event. It is the visible endpoint of a cascading system failure, the same underlying logic that left Somalia's 2011 famine declaration trailing roughly a year behind the first warnings of deteriorating conditions.
Climate change makes this harder to manage because the historical causality relationships for agricultural decisions are becoming less stable. Planting calendars built around historically reliable rainfall onset are less dependable than they were, while irrigation systems designed for past hydrological regimes now face different extremes. Heat stress can interact with water deficits to suppress crop and livestock productivity even in years when total rainfall looks unremarkable on paper.
The IPCC finds that climate change is already affecting all four dimensions of food security, including availability, access, utilisation, and stability.² It is no longer enough to know what happened after a season failed, especially because institutions increasingly need to understand what is changing now, where those changes are converging, who is exposed, and what is likely to happen next.
More data, but not always a better view of food systems
The paradox is that food systems today are generating more information than at any previous point in history. Meteorological agencies are tracking rainfall and temperature, Earth-observation platforms monitor vegetation and surface conditions, agricultural ministries estimate planting and production, and water agencies monitor rivers, reservoirs, and groundwater. Yet, a rainfall anomaly alone cannot establish who will become food insecure. The ability of an individual to cope or adapt may be influenced by market access, household assets, conflict exposure, and other factors which are often not tracked or assessed together.
In most national contexts, there is a deficit in connecting the dots across the relevant and available data to generate decision-grade intelligence for action. A World Bank assessment published in August 2026 found that 18 of the 65 countries and territories selected for the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises lacked acute food-security data, or data meeting the report's own technical requirements, representing the lowest country coverage the report has recorded in a decade.⁴ The same assessment found that data availability had declined across 22 humanitarian operations, with food security flagged as the least-monitored category of all. The assessment reiterates that no amount of modelling sophistication can resolve basic uncertainty about whether conditions are changing, where, and by how much, once the underlying evidence itself goes missing.
The real value of intelligence lies in what happens next
Food security systems have become increasingly sophisticated at documenting crises. The next frontier is to get better at interrupting the pathway toward them. Data analytics and AI will remain useful to achieve this goal, but no model can substitute for functioning statistical systems, hydrological monitoring, local knowledge, institutional trust, or the political will to act. Notably, every model and every forecast comes with uncertainty, and that uncertainty should never become an excuse for delay.
Emerging initiatives, such as the Joint Monitoring Report (JMR), offer optimism about how intelligence can translate into timely action by moving food security information from periodic assessment toward continuous risk intelligence. Developed jointly by the World Bank, national stakeholders, and partners, the JMR combines high-frequency data on food and fuel prices, exchange rates, rainfall and drought conditions, and conflict and displacement into an open, interpretable model that flags emerging food and nutrition security risks at the district level.⁵
For example, by late 2025, Somalia's JMR was already showing widespread signs of deterioration. Based on available data through November 2025, it estimated that roughly 1.73 million people were living in districts at risk of emergency-level food insecurity (IPC Phase 4 or worse), sharply up from around half a million a year earlier.⁶ In February 2026, Somalia's prime minister activated the country's National Preparedness Plan for Food and Nutrition Security Crises – the first time the plan had ever been triggered.⁷ The activation mobilised $50 million from the World Bank's IDA Crisis Response Window for early response, complemented by a $35 million IDA grant under Somalia's Bulsho resilience project8 and €63 million in new humanitarian funding from the European Union.⁹
Somalia's experience suggests what can be possible when monitoring, decision-making, and financing are built into a pre-coordinated and nationally owned architecture, rather than being reactive after a crisis has become protracted. It does not mean every crisis can be predicted or averted. Somalia's drought has continued to deepen even after the preparedness plan activation. However, what it demonstrates is that better-structured, better-targeted information can change the timing of action, and timing changes outcomes.
In practice, discussions about achieving resilient food systems should be oriented towards using available intelligence to solve extant food security challenges, because the real value of intelligence is whether it changes what happens next.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and not Frontier25.
