Core Idea
Written during the height of social and political upheaval in the early 1960s, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” became an anthem for transformation and resistance. It still resonates because change is not just possible but inevitable.
One way to cope with such inevitability is one existential threat at a time. The environmental movement has done this through a hierarchy.
Climate change sits at the apex. It’s the uber-crisis that commands conferences, carbon budgets, and trillion-dollar funding flows.
It feeds off seductive images of melting glaciers, burning forests, rising seas and a polar bear on a tiny iceberg. It feels both urgent and distant, catastrophic yet abstract. This allows for the comfortable choreography of long-term thinking, technological solutions, and policy frameworks that stretch across decades.
Beneath it, issues like biodiversity loss, deforestation, ocean acidification, and pollution occupy descending tiers of urgency, even when their ecological consequences may be equally catastrophic. Any ranking is not purely scientific but socially constructed by media visibility, policy tractability, and the psychological appeal of grand narratives that might unify global concern.
Meanwhile, food security gets relegated to a humanitarian subplot. It sits way down the list.
It’s framed as distribution logistics, agricultural efficiency, or a downstream consequence of climate disruption.
The assumption is implicit but powerful… solve climate, and food follows. Fix the temperature, and the rest arranges itself.
But here’s what a mindful sceptic notices.
This hierarchy is dangerously backwards. Climate change threatens civilisation’s long-term potential. Food insecurity collapses civilisation in real time, perhaps tomorrow.
Counterpoint
Needless to say, the standard rebuttal to upending the hierarchy is elegant and logical.
Climate change drives the weather extremes that disrupt harvests. It shifts rainfall patterns, intensifies droughts, and floods fertile deltas. Rising temperatures stress crops and livestock. Sea level rise salts coastal farmland.
From this perspective, food insecurity is simply climate change wearing work clothes.
The narrative continues to promise that if we address the root cause of carbon emissions and fossil fuel dependency, the symptoms will resolve. We should pour resources into renewable energy, carbon pricing, and emission reduction to resolve the problem.
Food security becomes a co-benefit, delivered as part of the climate solution package.
This sounds reasonable until you examine the mechanics of social collapse. Hungry populations don’t wait patiently for renewable energy transitions. They don’t pause their desperation while carbon markets find price equilibrium.
Food shortages trigger political instability, migration, and conflict within months, not decades.
Climate change is cooking the planet slowly. Food insecurity burns societies fast.
Thought Challenge
Timeline analysis… Map recent social upheavals against food price spikes versus climate disasters. The Arab Spring coincided with wheat price volatility. Brexit gained momentum during economic anxiety. Trump’s election followed a decade of stagnant wages while food costs climbed, remember the eggs. Which timeline drives political instability faster, climate impacts or food access?
Resource allocation test… Imagine you control global crisis funding for the next five years. You can prevent either 2°C of additional warming or food insecurity for 800 million people. Which choice preserves more civilisational stability? Which creates more space for long-term problem-solving?
Closing Reflection
Climate change is humanity’s greatest long-term challenge, but dead civilisations don’t solve climate change.
Societies under food stress become societies at war with themselves and their neighbours. They consume their seed corn, liquidate their institutions, and sacrifice their future for immediate survival.
A mindful sceptic doesn’t dismiss climate action but questions the luxury of ignoring food security while pursuing it. Feed people first, stabilise societies second, then tackle the atmospheric chemistry. Not because food matters more than the planet’s future, but because planetary futures require functional civilisations to build them.
This is uncomfortable realism.
Climate work becomes possible when societies are fed and stable enough to think beyond next week’s meal… and have the time to heed protest songs.
Evidence Support
Wheeler, T., & von Braun, J. (2013). Climate Change Impacts on Global Food Security. Science, 341(6145), 508-513
TL;DR... climate change impairs global food security, emphasising the vulnerability of food systems to both gradual and extreme climate-related disruptions. It identifies food insecurity as a potential catalyst for broader social and political instability.
Relevance to insight... food security is a critical nexus where environmental, economic, and political risks converge. It highlights how hunger-induced crises often precede the worst societal breakdowns, therefore sometimes making food security the more proximate existential threat.
Gerten, D., Heck, V., Jägermeyr, J., Bodirsky, B. L., Fetzer, I., Jalava, M., ... & Schellnhuber, H.J. (2020). Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries. Nature Sustainability, 3, 200–208.
TL;DR... feeding the projected 10 billion global population remains possible if food systems are transformed and planetary boundaries are observed, but current practices risk both food system collapse and exceeding safe environmental limits.
Relevance to insight... unmitigated risks to food supply can precipitate immediate and cascading crises, potentially ahead of slower-onset climate impacts.
FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO. (2023). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023. Food Security and Nutrition in a Rapidly Changing World. Rome, FAO.
TL;DR... annual UN report synthesises global data, indicating that acute food insecurity is worsening and now affects nearly one-third of humanity. Conflict and climate change are among the primary drivers, but food system shocks act as tipping points for crisis.
Relevance to insight... As the definitive synthesis, this report documents how food insecurity is already causing widespread social instability and population displacement, lending credibility to claims that a breakdown in the food system may trigger emergencies more rapidly than climate change alone.
Homer-Dixon, T., Walker, B., Biggs, R., Crépin, A. S., Folke, C., Lambin, E. F., ... & Troell, M. (2015). Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis. Ecology and Society, 20(3).
TL;DR... The paper details how complex networks—including food, energy, and economic systems—are increasingly interdependent and simultaneously vulnerable to cascading shocks, particularly noting that food crises can rapidly amplify into global systemic risk.
Relevance to insight... provides a risk architecture in which food insecurity is an existential threat multiplier, supporting arguments that the breakdown of food systems often precedes other catastrophes in terms of real-world impact.
Garnett, T., Appleby, M. C., Balmford, A., Bateman, I. J., Benton, T. G., Bloomer, P., ... & Godfray, H. C. J. (2013). Sustainable intensification in agriculture: premises and policies. Science, 341(6141), 33-34.
TL;DR... addresses the dilemma of increasing food production to meet demand without undermining environmental stability, detailing how unsustainable intensification creates feedbacks that erode long-term food and climate security.
Relevance to insight... existential risk emerges when food system fragility and ecological limits intersect—underscoring the necessity to prioritise food security as an urgent and foundational survival issue, potentially even before broader climate concerns.