On 10 December, the UN World Food Programme will receive the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Norwegian Nobel committee "for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” The Ceremony will be streamed live on Facebook.
We see this as a critical opportunity to highlight the links between climate, conflict and hunger, and elevate SDG2 on the global agenda. To help leverage this moment, the SDG2 Hub gathers key messages and white-label materials for use by the SDG2 community – please find these below. Join us to elevate this important moment!
A toxic mix of conflict, economic decline, climate extremes and the Coronavirus pandemic’s socio-economic fallout are driving people into a deepening phase of extreme food insecurity.
As acute food insecurity levels appear to be reaching new highs globally, also as a result of the socio-economic fallout of measures imposed to contain the spread of COVID-19, starting from already significant levels of acute food insecurity in early 2020.
In the coming months, famine is a real risk in parts of four countries - Burkina Faso, (Northeast) Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen - if conditions continue to deteriorate for populations partly or totally cut off from humanitarian access. Without immediate, urgent action, the world could experience its first famine since it was last declared in 2017 in parts of South Sudan.
In the next three to six months, 20 countries (Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Lebanon, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, The Central African Republic, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Niger, The Sudan, Venezuela, Yemen and Zimbabwe) likely to face potential spikes in high acute food insecurity and require urgent attention.
Find more information here in FAO-WFP early warning analysis of acute food insecurity hotspots.