Invest in Climate Adaptation Now or Face Worsening Hunger, Deputy Secretary-General Warns Security Council

Following are Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed's remarks to the Security Council's high-level open debate on conflict-related food insecurity, in New York today:

Thank you for convening this debate. I commend Sierra Leone for placing conflict-related food insecurity squarely where it belongs: At the centre of this Council's agenda.

Sierra Leone brings profound understanding to this debate. When you have lived through conflict's devastation, you know with absolute clarity that war destroys more than infrastructure, it destroys the ability to feed your children.

War and hunger are often two faces of the same crisis. The lived reality for hundreds of millions trapped in conflict zones bears this out with brutal clarity.

Bullets and bombs obliterate the fields where food grows, the markets where people trade, the roads that connect farmers to families. And hunger strikes back with equal force.

Empty bellies fuel desperation, desperation fuels displacement and violence, and the result is instability and often the destruction of the very systems that produce food.

This Council's mandate is maintenance of international peace and security, and there can be neither peace where people are starving, nor security where hunger drives conflict.

The evidence is irrefutable: Armed conflict drives acute food insecurity in 14 of 16 hunger hotspots worldwide. Last year, 295 million people faced acute hunger - 14 million more than the year before. The number of people experiencing catastrophic hunger have more than doubled to 1.9 million.

In Sudan, the world's largest hunger crisis, violence is perpetuating famine across Darfur and Kordofan. In Gaza, where famine was confirmed in August, the situation remains severe. Across Haiti, Yemen, the Sahel and the Democratic Republic of Congo, millions remain trapped in a vicious cycle of hunger and conflict.

Borders offer no protection from these consequences.

We live in an interconnected world where conflict in one region sends shockwaves across continents. The war in Europe disrupted grain exports that triggered food crises across Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Markets panicked, inflation soared and millions went hungry. As we saw in this instance once and again, the poorest pay the ultimate price.

This is the new arithmetic of conflict: When food systems are attacked, weaponized, the impact is global.

Food itself has become a weapon. Through deliberate starvation tactics, which we are seeing all too often, including recently in Gaza. But also, through the systematic destruction of agricultural systems. Through blockades that strangle supply. Through the calculated disruption of trade flows that leaves entire regions vulnerable.

The mechanics are devastating and a violation of international humanitarian law. Arms are looted and wells are poisoned. Grain stores are burned and processing facilities destroyed. Roads that connect farmers to markets are blocked. Nomadic communities disrupted as livestock is rustled and often destroyed. The infrastructure that makes food systems work is targeted.

And in a spiral of death, we continue to invest in military expenditure rather than putting an end of hunger. The world's total military expenditure over the past decade, estimated at $21. trillion, yet ending hunger by 2030 costs much less - $93 billion per year.

Then there is climate change, accelerating this crisis with deadly force. Floods wash away harvests, droughts turn fields to dust and rising temperatures devastate grazing lands. The predictable seasons farmers relied on for millennia are gone.

Many of the countries most vulnerable to climate stand in the shadow of conflict, and this is not a coincidence. I saw this firsthand as Nigeria's Minister for Environment.

When Lake Chad began drying up, what we faced was never just an ecological nor economic crisis. It was a governance and security crisis that helped give rise to Boko Haram. When population growth and urban sprawl intensified tensions between farmers and herders over shrinking resources, the issue was never simply about water access, it was about food systems under stress and communities pushed to breaking point.

When I met girls walking hours each day to fetch water, missing school in the process, it became clear to me that the challenge went far beyond resources, it touched gender inequality, education and the future of entire communities, putting the entire 2030 Agenda at risk.

We cannot and must not accept these examples as the new normal. The hunger-conflict nexus is a strategic and existential threat, and this Council must treat it as such.

We need action on four fronts.

First, humanitarian access must flow, ceasefires must hold and international humanitarian law must be upheld. The obstruction, delays and excuses that have characterized too many conflicts must end.

We see the consequences in Sudan and Gaza, where humanitarian access remains severely restricted even as famine takes hold. Food systems that should sustain civilian populations have become battlegrounds.

Humanitarian workers must reach people in need and food systems must be protected as the civilian infrastructure they represent: the farms, markets, transport routes and storage facilities that serve as lifelines rather than legitimate targets.

Resolutions 2417 (2018) and 2573 (2021), which this organ adopted in 2018 and 2021 respectively, give us the framework - by condemning starvation as a method of warfare, demanding protection for civilians and requiring unimpeded humanitarian access.

Years later, crises are more devastating than ever. What we need is enforcement. That means broadening engagement beyond Governments to include civil society organizations that witness conditions on the ground, regional actors who understand local dynamics, and national partners who possess the leverage the international community lacks. We must work with all of them to drive implementation and demand accountability for violations.

Ceasefires and humanitarian pauses serve as strategic necessities for protecting the food systems people depend on. When parties facilitate access instead of weaponizing denial, they create space for recovery and build pathways to lasting peace.

Second, the path from fragility to resilience runs through sustainable food systems. Building them requires a fundamental shift from short-term relief to long-term transformation, and from emergency response to strategic investment as I recently reinforced in the Call to Action coming out of the UN Food Systems Stocktake+4 in Ethiopia

Achieving the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals demands this transformation and we cannot end hunger, build resilient communities or secure peace without it.

While hunger fuels violence and displacement, resilient food systems can break that cycle.

When smallholder farmers thrive, local economies grow. When food systems connect to health, education and social protection, they become the foundation for stability. This means strengthening local markets so communities can access affordable, nutritious food.

Building storage facilities that protect harvests and processing infrastructure that adds value. Ensuring women and young people have ownership and decision-making power over the systems that feed their families.

The African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme framework, renewed just this year through the Kampala Declaration, demonstrates this commitment in action - with African countries pledging to increase agrifood output by 45 per cent and triple intra-African trade while building climate resilience.

This leads me to my third point: Climate action stands as an essential pillar of both food security and peace. As the Secretary-General told world leaders at thirtieth UN Climate Change Conference: Keeping temperatures below 1.5°C is slipping from our grasp.

Even a brief overshoot risks pushing natural systems past the point of no return, exposing billions to worsening hunger while intensifying the very threats to peace and security this Council is charged with preventing.

Ensuring early warning systems reach every person is also non-negotiable. We must deliver adaptation finance at scale so communities can manage resources, build resilience and prevent climate stress from igniting conflict. When farmers have drought-resistant seeds and water management systems, when communities have the tools to adapt, they can weather shocks instead of breaking under them.

Investing in climate adaptation today prevents hunger tomorrow.

Fourth, peace is the only sustainable solution. Humanitarian action saves lives today, but it cannot end war. Only political solutions can do that.

Achieving lasting peace requires treating food, agriculture and humanitarian access as strategic imperatives. That means Governments, donors and implementers working across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus to tackle root causes of conflicts, not just their symptoms.

Prevention demands early investment. If we wait for famine declarations to mobilize resources, we have already failed. People have already died. Early action saves lives, protects livelihoods and costs far less than crisis response.

But prevention also requires addressing exclusion, inequality and the systemic absence of State services that create conditions for conflict.

When Governments cannot deliver basic services, when marginalization deepens, when people lose hope, grievances multiply and food insecurity becomes one more accelerant on the fire. This is where the nexus approach becomes essential.

We cannot address food security without addressing the root causes of conflict. We cannot build peace without ensuring people can feed themselves. We cannot achieve sustainable development without tackling both at the same time.

As an old East African proverb teaches us: "When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." Today, the "grass" - the innocent civilians of Sudan, Gaza, Haiti, Yemen, the Sahel, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and so many other places - are suffering beyond measure. They are paying the price for conflicts they did not choose, and for decisions in which they have no voice.

This Council has both the authority and the responsibility to act. Let us choose to build a future where food is never again used as a weapon, where no child goes hungry because of war, and where food systems become engines of peace, resilience and hope rather than casualties of conflict.