Ms Noreen Gumbo:

I am the director of humanitarian programmes in Trócaire. I have worked in humanitarian and development aid for more than 25 years. I have two messages today. The first is simple. Climate change is already a crisis in most of the vulnerable countries in which we work. It is impacting significantly on hunger and nutrition. Without tackling the underlying causes of climate change hunger will increase in the coming decades. Reducing global emissions, protecting people’s livelihoods and investing in resilience are essential to protect food security in the context of this changing climate.

In Ireland we are increasingly aware of the impact of extreme weather. Imagine if, instead of a forecast of a week of snow, we were facing an entire season of drought, following on from a previous season of drought. This is what east Africa is currently undergoing. Drought is an insidious crisis. By the time a drought hits the headlines families have been doing everything they can for months, such as selling livestock or tools, which is their equivalent of bank savings, taking children out of school and migrating temporarily, thus splitting up families. As the gap between droughts in east Africa decreases, families are unable to recover before the next one hits. In countries Trócaire worked in during the period 2015 to 2016, such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan, Sudan and Malawi, we have seen drought, food shortage and flash floods. In Sierra Leone, Myanmar, Pakistan, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua we have seen heavy flooding and landslides. Trócaire and other agencies are providing humanitarian aid when needed, but it is not enough. We are helping communities to adapt their agricultural practices, strengthen natural resource management and diversify their incomes to increase resilience, but without tackling the root causes of this people will run out of options.

That brings me to the second message, which is that hunger is caused by poverty, not by inadequate food supply. The poverty is in the form of lack of access to economic resources to buy food or lack of resources such as land, water and tools to grow it. The world currently produces enough food to feed the global population, yet the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that approximately 795 million people of the 7.3 billion in the world, or one in nine, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2014 to 2016. Almost all the hungry people lived in developing countries. We find that the hunger affects children under five years old and the elderly most quickly and dramatically. Eradicating hunger in areas of the developing world that experience it, and that are already experiencing increasing food insecurity as a result of climate change, requires a series of responses at various levels. Key among these is the requirement to increase the resilience of food production to the impacts of climate change in these regions, to increase local incomes and access to food and to ensure people's livelihoods.

With this understanding, if we are concerned about food security in the context of a changing climate, we must be concerned, first and foremost, with ensuring all countries, including Ireland, will fulfil their obligations under the Paris Agreement to hold the rise in average temperature to well below 2° Celsius - 1.5° Celsius should be our aim - and the countries and communities experiencing increasing food insecurity as a result of climate impacts will be supported to adapt. In his visit to Ireland in 2015 the then Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon said, "Ireland has been a champion of efforts to counter hunger, but today one cannot be a leader on hunger without also being a leader on climate change."