Resilience
The recurrence of disasters and crises undermines nations’ efforts to eradicate hunger and malnutrition and to achieve sustainable development. Over the past 12 years, disasters have caused an estimated USD 1.3 trillion in damages, causing dead of 1.1 million people and affecting another 2.7 billion. In 2012 alone, disasters caused economic losses at USD 138 billion, continuing the recent upward tendency and marking the first time that annual economic losses have exceeded USD 100 billion in three years. Disasters and crises threaten the production of food at local, national and global levels. Shocks can strike suddenly like a flash flood or a drought. Crises can occur as a single emergency, one can trigger another, or multiple events can combine and impact at same time with magnified effects. As an example, three years of repeated floods (2010 to 2012) have inflicted serious damage on Pakistan’s economy, halving its potential growth. Pakistan lost a total of USD 16 billion to the floods in these three years, with estimated damages in agriculture amounting to USD 2 billion in flood damages on over 1 million acres of standing crops. The Hyogo Framework Action (HFA) provided an approach to reduce vulnerabilities and risk to hazards. Over 12 years, this process has been monitored but was various in different countries. The process to develop a successor arrangement to the HFA is already underway. To address declining risks of disasters, we need to promote relationship between interventions in different scales. Challenges of climate change and disaster risk reduction should be solved in an integrated way through policies and strategies.
Social protection
FAO pointed that today only a fifth of the world population could get social protection. Social security is regarded as a basic content of social protection. But in rural regions, it is not enough. Labor market informality limits the potential coverage of contributory. Without access to instruments for risk-mitigation or risk-sharing, poor rural families are more likely to sell off their assets, shift to less risky, but lower yielding crops, or take their children out of school to work, which is likely to weaken future livelihood prospects. The main challenge of government, illustrated by FAO, is to extend social protection to the most deprived and vulnerable people, especially in rural area and urban informal sector. And next we will overcome often fragmented delivery of social protection in isolation of other economic policies. To solves, FAO suggests that we should help household to overcome dietary energy undernourishment by improving their access to food with particular strong impacts. Increasing local economy to increase employment to get positive feedbacks. All in all, different sectors of the government need to work together to deliver social protection successfully.
Climate change
Agriculture, forestry and fisheries have many challenges today. Agricultural production will have to increase globally by an estimated 60 percent by 2050, and to double in developing countries, to meet projected expanding demands for food and feed from a growing and changing world population. Many current crops are already under stress through degradation of land and water resources and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services resulting from unsustainable practices. These challenges will be exacerbated an expected increase in extreme weather events. Without properly addressing these issues, we will not succeed in ensuring world food security, sustainable and equitable development and poverty eradication. Climate change is expected to impact the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors in many different ways. While rising temperatures and the effects of CO2 fertilization may benefit production in some regions, in the short term the overall consequences to yields are expected to be adverse. Climate change impact four part of food security: food availability, food accessibility, the stability of food supply, and the ability of consumers to adequately utilize food including food safety and nutrition. It need a variety of approaches. Firstly, we should sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes. Secondly, adapting and building resilience to climate change and last is reducing and removing greenhouse gas emissions. International governance is also curial in addressing action in sectors related to designing.
Ecosystem services, biodiversity, genetic resources
Biodiversity is key to food security and nutrition. Its genetic component provides the variation needed to increase food production, enhance its quality and adapt it to ever-changing environmental and socio-economic conditions. Many economic sectors depend on biodiversity and ecosystem services, including agriculture, fisheries, forestry, health, nutrition, energy and tourism. The expected growth of the human population, and the consequent need for additional food, feed and fiber, will put stronger pressure on the environment. Presently, humans use only a fraction of the existing biodiversity for food security and nutrition. Using such a small number of species, often with a narrow genetic base, increases the vulnerability of agriculture systems and puts food security and nutrition at increasing risk. Global initiatives has been established addressing the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
In conclusion, FAO has promoted a lot to approach SDGs. There are totally 14 aspects pointed by FAO and here I just show some of them. If you are interested in this topic please see more information on FAO website. It is a comprehensive project connected with SDGs. However, we could see that most of suggestions are provided to government level which is far away from individuals. And supervision mechanism in action need to be refined. There is still a long process to achieve goals.