An inclusive assessment framework for exploring climate-resilient nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa

Achieving climate-smart nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa is an urgent challenge due to increasing climate risks to agricultural production, population growth and food price volatility This necessitates an integrated evidence base that takes into account not only future food system modelling but wider academic expertise and stakeholder knowledge and the plausible and desirable transformations that these information streams can provide. Accordingly, we use the integrated Future Estimator for Emissions and Diets (iFEED) to explore scenarios of food system transformation towards nutrition security. iFEED integrates climate, crop and land use modelling to explore scenarios of relevance to the policy landscape, as informed by stakeholders, assessing the adequacy of energy and nutrient supplies to meet dietary requirements at a population level. Our results show that calories are not always sufficient at the population level in extremely hot and dry years by mid-century in Zambia, even when maximising food production on available land. The majority of micronutrients also remain below population requirements. An alternative scenario where crops for population level nutrition security are prioritised shows that there are larger calorie shortfalls in extremely hot and dry years, although more micronutrient requirements are met than in the production-focused scenario. Both scenarios show benefits, and we point to ways forward that address the challenges to achieving climate-resilient nutrition security in the region. We also introduce our latest thinking on a new inclusive assessment framework that aims to expand iFEED to incorporate bottom-up disruptive seeds work and top-down modelling across spatial scales to deliver socially-equitable nutrition security in Kenya.