Figure 8.18: Estimated coastal erosion threat in the Arctic
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Source: Lantuit, Overduin and Wetterich (2012).
8.5 Key impacts 8.5.1 Food security
People are considered food secure when they always have availability of and adequate access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life (FAO et al. 2017). The discussions in this section cover three critical issues–food availability, food access and food utilization.
Hunger and malnourishment A sizeable proportion of the worlds’ seven billion people are hungry and malnourished. Roughly one billion people have energy-deficient diets, and about one billion people suffer from diseases of energy surplus (called the ‘hidden hunger’ of micronutrient deficiencies) (Godfray and Garnett 2014). Although undernutrition is slowly declining, 155 million children under five years old, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa
and South Asia, still suffer from stunted growth. Simultaneously, increasing numbers of people are suffering from overnutrition: more than 2 billion adults are overweight and 500 million are obese. Moreover, 88 per cent of countries face two or three forms of malnutrition (Development Initiatives 2017), and undernutrition and obesity increasingly coexist in the same households (FAO et al. 2017).
Malnutrition and changing consumption patterns put greater pressure on land resources making land-use decisions more important than ever before. Most food is sourced from terrestrial environments, though 17 per cent of global animal protein and 6.7 per cent of all protein consumption is from fish (FAO 2016). While food costs have fallen since 2008, this trend has not been constant (FAO 2017c), with volatility attributed to increased demand from rapidly developing countries and competition among first-generation biofuel producers
