Climate Change and Food Security: How to Manage a Web of Global Challenges

Silently counting to four, David M. Beasley holds up his right hand and bends one finger for each second. “Someone just died from hunger”, he says before quietly counting the seconds again. One. Two. Three. Four. “A child just died from hunger”, the former Executive Director of the World Food Programme solemnly adds, pausing to let the message sink in.

For Beasley, who received the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the U.N. organisation, it’s a dramatic way to start his guest lecture at the 2025 Nobel Meeting in Economic Sciences. It’s also Beasley’s way to drive home his most important point: In a world that produces plenty of food and material goods for the majority of the roughly 8 billion people on Earth, almost 700 million go hungry each year, and an estimated 9 million die from malnutrition.

This is not only a human tragedy, Beasley makes clear. Lack of food security is also a leading cause of political instability that contributes to a growing number of global crises, including military conflicts, geopolitical tensions, and climate change – which in turn threatens crops and food supplies. These interconnected challenges require pragmatic policy responses, as several sessions at the Lindau Economics Meeting illustrated.

The Smartest Investment? Local Aid

More people are forced to leave their home than ever before in recent history. At the end of 2024, an estimated 123 million people worldwide “were forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing the public order”, the UNHCR reports. This was almost twice the number seen in 2015. And while the majority (about 72 million) stayed within their own country, the number of international refugees and asylum seekers reached a new high in 2024 – putting pressure on politicians in many Western nations to act on a perceived “migrant crisis”.

The best way to respond would be to increase international help and invest in local communities abroad, David Beasley argues. “Almost no one wants to leave their home country”, he told his audience in Lindau. “But if you can’t feed your children, there’s not a single parent in this room that wouldn’t do what it takes to take care of your children.” Food security was therefore “absolutely essential” to peace in the world, the 68-year-old American emphasised. “When people have food, conflict goes down.”

For maximum impact, aid programmes should be designed to strengthen society, encourage entrepreneurship, and provide infrastructure investments, Beasley said. Under his leadership, from 2017 until 2023, the WFP “built over 110,000 holding ponds, small dams, reservoirs, 70,000 to 84,000 kilometres of feeder roads, 28,000 kilometres of water canals”, he recounted, adding that such measures helped to diminish “conflicts between herders and farmers” and supported people far beyond their own needs.

“I found out that an African woman doesn’t have to go to MIT or Harvard Business School to understand capitalism”, Beasley said. “If you give these women the tools they need, they’ll feed their families and the communities.” He learned the lesson when inspecting the progress of an irrigation project in Africa. Within two years, a formerly arid landscape had been transformed into lush gardens, Beasley recalled, and one woman told him, “Not only are we feeding our families now. We’re selling into the marketplace. We’re buying our clothes, our medicines, and I just paid for my son’s wedding.”

Help Now – or Pay a Much Higher Price Later

It’s success stories like this one that illustrate the benefits of foreign aid, Beasley believes, and they helped him answer a question he encountered in every corner of the affluent world whenever he was fundraising: why should the money of taxpayers go to distant countries, rather than pay for healthcare benefits, education or new roads at home? “And so I would say, ‘If you’re not going to do it out of the goodness of your heart, let me explain it from your national security interests and your financial interests’”, Beasley said.

His argument is simple: supporting people in need before they’re forced to leave home tends to be far cheaper for affluent countries than managing migration when refugees arrive at their borders. “I absolutely believe we can eliminate migration by necessity, which is most of the migration”, the former WFP director said. “That’s the migration that causes the controversy, the conflict, the problems. And if you can address migration by necessity you’re left with migration by choice – and that’s a much more pleasant debate.”

Consequently, the recent “dismantling of USAID”, the U.S. Agency for International Development, by the Trump administration could have dire consequences, Beasley predicted. As a Republican politician who served as the Governor of South Carolina in the 1990s, Beasley is no friend of bureaucracy. “Did USAID need some reforms?”, he asked. “Of course it did!” But eliminating the agency was a drastic, deeply concerning move, Beasley said, as extremist groups could in many countries exploit the vacuum left by missing aid.

“When you start having destabilisation in these areas you’re going to pay for it a hundred fold”, Beasley predicted, adding that political leaders in the West must “understand that if you have migration by necessity, and you don’t have the systems in place to do it right, you’re going to have problems. Let’s address the root cause so you don’t have these problems – because people don’t want to leave their home. They don’t.”

Global Warming: What We Eat Adds to the Heat

Food waste is a tragedy in several ways. It highlights the inequality between rich and poor nations, between overconsumption and risk of starvation, while also contributing to another worldwide challenge: global warming.

At least one third of all food that is produced never gets eaten – some goes to waste on farms and fields, some during processing and transportation, and much ends up in garbage bins because it doesn’t get sold by supermarkets before the “best by” date, or rots away in the fridges and storage rooms of consumers. The entire amount wasted “could feed two billion people”, David Beasley pointed out.

Meanwhile, food production accounts for roughly 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a new study by the EAT-Lancet Commission finds. Reducing waste could therefore make a significant contribution to mitigating the climate crisis, along with preserving biodiversity, shifting to a predominantly plant-based diet, and fostering regenerative agriculture.

There’s an additional benefit to incentivising more sustainable forms of food production, especially in critical ecosystems like rainforests: plants provide a natural form of carbon storage. An average tree absorbs around 20 kg of CO₂ per year. Preventing deforestation today can therefore protect the planet from greater harm tomorrow. That is the core idea behind the Amazon Fund, an initiative by the Brazilian government. Major donors include the U.S., Norway, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan.

Lars Peter Hansen, of the University of Chicago, was part of an international team of researchers who studied the effects of providing financial incentives to farmers in the Amazon, encouraging forest preservation over agriculture or animal farming. Their study indicates that international payments as low as 15 USD per ton of CO₂ equivalent could “lead to a substantial net reforestation and carbon capture”.

What’s Prompting Climate Inaction

The challenge lies in putting these insights into practice, Hansen explained in a panel discussion about New Approaches to Climate Policies and International Cooperation with Steven Chu (Stanford University), Elisa Rottner (now ETH Zurich), Brian Schmidt (Australian National University), and Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University), moderated by Klaus Schmidt (University of Munich, LMU). “We need better carbon accounting systems” to document the actual impact of climate-positive measures, Hansen said, given that “certain types of carbon offsets and the like” were often used fraudulently.

This ties in with the problem that both cause and effects of climate change are shrouded by uncertainty. “Emissions impact climate change, economic opportunities are altered by climate change”, Hansen explained. Technological advances, such as fusion reactors, could at one point provide abundant clean energy – but if and when remains unclear. “And these things interact”, Hansen added. “That’s what makes them really challenging.”

But open questions should not be an excuse for inaction, the economist emphasised. “We need to acknowledge uncertainty”, Hansen demanded, because there were “important trade-offs between acting now versus waiting when it might be very costly.”

Taking climate action, however, seems to become harder, despite the urgency that scientists see. One reason is strong resistance by the public to carbon taxation, a favourite tool of many economists. “Carbon pricing affects some people more than others, and particularly poor individuals”, Joseph Stiglitz noted. “Even if it’s a smaller fraction of their income, they’re less able to bear it.” This was clearly visible in the Yellow Vest movement in France, he added, which gained strength in part because of people’s opposition to a proposed carbon tax. “One has to be sensitive to the distributive effects”, Stiglitz said, “and one has to use multiple instruments in responding.”

Another reason for the widespread unpopularity of climate action is messaging, the economist suggested. All too often, people were told they would have to give up their current lifestyle to save the planet. “That framing, I think, is wrong”, Stiglitz argued, because it “really undermines the selling of climate change. What one should be doing is talking about how lower energy prices are actually good for economic growth. How a green strategy is a pro-growth strategy, and if it’s well designed, can actually be pro-equity.”

In addition, the term “tax” was burdened with negative sentiments, Lars Peter Hansen noted, especially when people were wondering where their money might go. “Economists have done themselves no favour by calling these things ‘carbon taxes’ because we never talk very much about what’s going to be done with the revenue”, Hansen observed. “And that has to be an important part of the story.” Otherwise “people are going to be deeply suspicious”, he added. “They’re going to say, ‘The government’s going to take my money, and they’re going to flush it away’ or something.”

Geopolitics and the Trump Effect

How much of a difference will it make when the world’s biggest economy does a U-turn? Under President Biden, the U.S. government invested heavily in renewable energy, infrastructure upgrades and other policies designed to reduce he nation’s carbon footprint. When Donald Trump took office in January 2025, he immediately passed executive orders aimed at stopping these efforts. “Some of Trump’s policies since becoming President again are slowing things down”, said Steven Chu, a physicist who served as Secretary of Energy under President Obama. “You can do profound things with executive orders. That part is scary.”

But no matter how passionately Trump may be campaigning against solar and wind power – not even he can change the rise of electric vehicles or the dynamics of technology and market forces, which are driving down the price of clean energy. “Half the cars sold in China are now EVs”, Chu noted. “The price of EVs and the price of batteries are plunging, and that you’re not going to stop. Just like you could not stop the price of solar plunging.” The United States, despite its massive weight in the global economy, “isn’t the only player”, Chu added. “They’re not the seed of every innovation, and because of that, these things will continue.”

There are plenty of other challenges left, however, the panel discussion made clear. Energy storage is crucial to making green energy available even when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow – but it’s still expensive. Location matters, too: some countries are perfectly positioned to harvest natural resources, while others may need to use nuclear energy if they want to avoid carbon emissions. Transporting clean energy poses another challenge. One option is to convert the power of wind and solar farms into hydrogen – but that is both complicated and costly, as physicist Brian Schmidt pointed out. “It’s three to four times more expensive to transport hydrogen compared to LNG”, he said, referring to liquid natural gas.

“And there’s another thing”, Schmidt said. “We’re living in a more geopolitically unstable environment” where supply chains could be easily disrupted. “Maybe a better way to do it would be to try to use the cheap electricity on shore to do things that robots can do, and then have value add happen at other places.”

Technology to the Rescue?

The rising cost of climate-related disasters highlights a basic injustice. “Nations in the Global South have contributed very little to climate change so far, but they are suffering most from it”, Klaus Schmidt observed. What could – and should – wealthier nations do to help?

Beyond a moral responsibility, there are also very good practical reasons to support developing countries, Elisa Rottner suggested. “If we want to fight climate change, ultimately everyone needs to decrease emissions – including the developing countries.” Technology transfer could be an important element, she suggested, by allowing African nations to shift from fossil to renewable energy. Currently, “those countries also tend to be energy importers”, she observed, prompting Ethiopia to ban the import of cars with combustion engines, “not because they wanted to green up, but because they wanted to avoid having to import oil.”

Upgrading power grids is expensive, however, and many countries lack the necessary capital. Affluent nations should fill the gap, Steven Chu argued. “The importance of financing is huge”, he said. “I, for one, think absolutely richer countries should underwrite the financing.”

But even if the global community came together, this would likely not be enough to stop global warming, Chu worries. “If you believe anything about the climate model, we’re going to go three degrees Celsius of a temperature increase above the historic median“, he said, arguing that this would require removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, for example through direct air capture.

Luckily, there’s still time left to develop such groundbreaking technologies and drive the price down, Chu said. “The damage [from climate change] is going to be done mostly in the next centuries”, so humans still had a chance to prevent the worst. It’s “like you’ve been smoking cigarettes for 30 years and you start to see a series of mutations”, Chu said. “But unlike cigarette smoking, we can reverse it. You’ve got to suck the carbon out of the air by all means.”