©Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/Frederic Courbet

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) just released its 2018 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report. Two alarming facts immediately stand out.

First, for the third straight year — and after a long period of decline — the number of undernourished people in the world has increased. According to the report, today, 821 million people are undernourished; about 50 million more than there were in 2015 or one out of every nine people on the planet.

The other flashing red light is the link between the rise in global hunger and climate change. FAO finds that “exposure to more complex, frequent and intense climate extremes is threatening to erode and reverse gains made in ending hunger and malnutrition.” Moreover, the impacts are not always obvious. Even in places where harvests appear normal, there is increasing evidence of climate change altering crops in peculiar ways that reduce their nutritional value.

For example, last month, a study in Nature Climate Change from the Harvard School of Public Health examined crop production in 151 countries. It found that rising carbon levels in the atmosphere — the key cause of climate change — are, by themselves, slowly depressing production of critical nutrients like protein, iron, and zinc. They don’t completely understand why, but it appears that absorbing larger amounts of carbon — which plants use as food — is altering internal processes within plants and making crops like rice and maize less nutritious.

Taken together, the FAO food security barometer and the Harvard study make it clear that climate change is no longer a distant threat. Just as a hurricane sends out strong winds and dangerous surf before making landfall, the outer bands of climate change are now affecting farmers, particularly in poor countries. And it’s all hurting food and nutrition security in ways we are just beginning to understand.

Is the world ready to respond with an effort that is equal to the enormity of the challenge?

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we are increasing our focus on the threat of climate change to agricultural production in developing countries because it impacts our core mission, which is to find solutions to problems that prevent the world’s poorest people from living healthy, productive lives.

That’s why we devote such a large portion of our resources to agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. That’s where the majority of the world’s poorest people live, and most them work small plots of land as farmers.

Development economists often point out that the most dramatic economic transformations of our time, like the rise of countries such as Korea or the stunning industrialization of China, all began with massive efforts that enabled smallholder farmers to become more productive and more profitable.

But while there are many examples of agriculture replacing poverty with wealth, there is no precedent for achieving such a transformation under the burden of the extreme climate change the world is experiencing today.

That’s why we need a bigger global effort focused on helping the world’s most vulnerable farmers, many of whom already struggle to adapt. We believe it will take myriad of global partners supporting ground-breaking research and innovation.

Last December, at the One Planet Summit in Paris, the foundation announced an ambitious plan to support research that could deliver new solutions to help farmers and livestock keepers adapt to challenges climate change is already bringing, like more frequent encounters with heat, drought, floods, pests, and plant and animal diseases.

Meanwhile, we are deepening our partnership with a consortium known as the CGIAR, which, among other things, hosts the worlds largest network of crop breeders dedicated to helping poor farmers prosper. They are now working with increasing urgency to produce a steady stream of new crop varieties and livestock breeds that will enable farmers to be both more productive and resilient. The results thus far include rice that can withstand flooding, and new varieties of climate-ready beans, including beans that can thrive in scorching temperatures and others that can evade drought thanks to long roots and a short maturing time.

Photo Credit: CIAT, Neil Palmer

The value of such innovations for helping farmers cope with climate change can be found in places like Fanny Maliko’s farm in Southern Malawi. There, in 2015, during one of the worst droughts the region had ever experienced, she harvested an impressive crop of drought-resistant and nutritious orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. They originally were developed by the CGIAR’s International Potato Center, which worked with local farmers like Mabvuto Mndau in Malawi to establish a network of growers to supply farmers like Fanny with planting materials.

We should all be alarmed that hunger and malnutrition are again on the rise and that climate change could make this the new norm. But we should also remember that we don’t enter this battle unarmed. The history of modern of agriculture — from the Dust Bowl of 1930s North America to the famines that killed tens of millions of people in India and China — is the story of how a steadfast commitment to innovation can overcome seemingly insurmountable adversity.