Navigating climate conflict: Uncharted Waters teams up with FAO to forecast agri-food system risks

Improved understanding of conflicts in agrifood systems under climate change and climate variability

Uncharted Waters and partners will support the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations in Rome (FAO) in better understanding how climate impacts on agrifood systems and people may fuel conflicts, together with other factors, and how conflicts may exacerbate vulnerability to climate change and variability in rural regions across the world.

It is fairly well known how extreme weather events and long-term climate change can detrimentally affect agriculture and more broadly rural livelihoods and food security. Less well understood is how climate impacts may contribute, interacting with other important factors, to fuelling conflicts. Conflict early warning systems are emerging, but there is still a lack of well-grounded scalable tools to effectively address and forecast the interlinkages between climate, agriculture and conflict risk.

We will help FAO with the design and development of a tool to analyse and forecast conflict hotspots which relate directly or indirectly to climate impacts on agrifood systems, based on our bespoke digital ‘twin’ platform and the machine learning driven CoPro conflict model. Such an operational tool can inform investments and policies, and help FAO and development partners to design, fund, and implement local adaptation actions that take into account climate-security risks.

The initial scoping and design activities will run until November 2024.

For more information send an email to info@unchartedwaters.com