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Country: Yemen Source: World Food Programme ADEN – Nearly half of the population (47 percent) in Government-controlled areas of Yemen are facing high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis. The analysis shows that around 5 million people are currently experiencing Crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3+), including 1.4 million people in Emergency conditions (IPC Phase 4). The outlook is expected to worsen as the year progresses. During the June-September 2026 lean season, an estimated 5.4 million people (51 percent of the population in government-controlled areas) are projected to face acute food insecurity. The number of people in Emergency conditions (IPC Phase 4) is expected to rise to 1.5 million during this period. Even the post-harvest period from October to December 2026 is unlikely to bring meaningful recovery. The number of people in Emergency conditions (IPC Phase 4) is expected to further increase to 1.8 million, underscoring the severity and persistence of the crisis. Persistently weak purchasing power, continued macro-economic deterioration, high agriculture input costs and a sharp decline in humanitarian assistance, as per current levels of confirmed funding, are expected to drive high levels of food insecurity through the end of the year. “The latest IPC findings send a stark warning. Families are being pushed beyond their coping capacity by the combined effects of economic collapse emanating from conflict and civil unrest, climate shocks, disrupted livelihoods and declining humanitarian support,” FAO, WFP and UNICEF said in a joint statement. Households remain highly dependent on markets at a time when purchasing power continues to erode. Irregular salaries, high food and fuel prices, reduced income opportunities and constraints on agricultural production are limiting families’ ability to meet even basic food needs. At the same time, humanitarian food assistance and humanitarian interventions in the areas of nutrition, health, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) are expected to decline sharply because of critical funding shortfalls, leaving millions without support as needs rise. Food insecurity remains a major driver of Yemen’s high malnutrition burden. Women and children, internally displaced people, and marginalized communities are among those most at risk. Reduced dietary diversity, poor household food consumption, limited access to essential preventive nutrition services, and worsening living conditions are increasing the risk of acute malnutrition, particularly among pregnant and breastfeeding women and young children. Displaced households continue to face severe food consumption gaps and are increasingly relying on negative coping strategies. Marginalized families with limited access to livelihoods and basic services are experiencing deepening hunger and vulnerability. Agriculture and livestock production—critical lifelines for rural families and local food systems—remain under severe pressure from high input costs, climate shocks, pest outbreaks, flood risks and disrupted trade and supply chains. Around 60 percent of Yemeni households rely at least partially on agriculture for their livelihoods, yet growing numbers need emergency agricultural assistance to sustain production, protect assets and prevent further deterioration. FAO, WFP, and UNICEF are calling on the international community to urgently scale up funding for humanitarian food assistance, nutrition services, health, agriculture and resilience programming. Without immediate, sustained and scaled-up action, millions of vulnerable people risk falling deeper into hunger, malnutrition and irreversible livelihood loss. # # # About FAO: The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Our goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. With over 194 members, FAO works in over 130 countries worldwide. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, via @FAOYemen About WFP: The United Nations World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, via @WFPYemen About UNICEF: UNICEF promotes the rights and wellbeing of every child, in everything we do. Together with our partners, we work in 190 countries and territories to translate that commitment into practical action, focusing special effort on reaching the most vulnerable and excluded children, to the benefit of all children, everywhere. For more information about UNICEF Yemen and its work for children, visit www.unicef.org/yemen

Country: World Source: Asian Disaster Preparedness Center By Irfan Maqbool In April 1815, Mount Tambora erupted on the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history and perhaps one of the earliest documented global disasters to produce cascading impacts across Asia, Europe, and North America. Volcanic ash and sulfur particles spread through the atmosphere, reducing sunlight and lowering temperatures across large parts of the world. The eruption itself lasted for days. The volcanic winter it triggered lasted nearly three years. 1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer, marking the beginning of famine, epidemic, and displacement that moved continent by continent, with no one grasping their common cause. When families in New England harvested nothing from their frostbitten fields in the summer of 1816, they did not know why. When farmers in Bengal watched their neighbors die by the thousands in a cholera epidemic in 1817, they did not know the connection either. When Lord Byron, moved by the gloom descending around him, wrote his 1816 poem ‘Darkness‘ and described the condition of a world in crisis in a single searing line, ‘Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless,’ he too did not know its cause. Those who suffered had no name for what connected them. What began as a geological event in one location swiftly spread through food systems, public health, economies, and governance on different continents, sometimes as a direct shock and sometimes as an additional stressor on societies already under strain. The world did not learn quickly. In the century and a half after Tambora, disasters continued to take an enormous toll. Earthquakes, cyclones, and floods claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in multiple events, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The 1920 Haiyuan earthquake in China killed approximately 200,000 people. The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Japan destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama and claimed over 100,000 lives. The most devastating tolls, however, came not from the events themselves but from the famines and epidemics that often followed them. The 1931 floods in China are estimated to have killed between two and four million people. The Bengal famine of 1943, following a devastating cyclone the previous year, claimed an estimated 3 million lives. The scale and recurrence of these losses gradually made the cost of inaction impossible to ignore. Governments and the international community responded by building dedicated systems, one organized around disasters, the other around climate, each guided by its own objectives, institutional priorities, and financing architecture. Both produced progress, and both evolved separately. The question is no longer whether these systems can work independently. It is about what level of impact becomes possible when two systems begin to work with genuine coherence. The answer lies partly in understanding why they evolved separately in the first place. The disaster risk stream was formalized in 1987 with the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and subsequently progressed through successive global frameworks, supported by its own agencies, financing structures, and reporting mechanisms. The climate adaptation stream had different origins, emerging from the UNFCCC adopted at Rio in 1992. By 2015, when both the Sendai Framework and the Paris Agreement were adopted in the same year, the overlap was undeniable. What began as a practical division of effort had, over thirty years, quietly solidified into a defining feature of international disaster and climate risk governance. That feature has a cost, and it is not administrative. It is about what does not get done. When two systems address the same risk separately, each optimizes for its own objectives, its own reporting requirements, and its own financing mechanism. The problem is not simple duplication. It is something less visible and more persistent: two systems each doing part of the work, without a mechanism to ensure that the parts add up to something coherent. Pakistan’ s 2022 floods demonstrate what that gap looks like when it matters most. When UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the country as facing “a monsoon on steroids,” he was referring to a crisis that had submerged a third of the country, affected more than 33 million people, and simultaneously disrupted the agriculture, transport, and health sectors. The monsoon brought the flood. The flood revealed deeper vulnerabilities. For the communities living through it, the crisis was one. For the institutions responding to it, there were many separate problems. Pakistan is no exception. Reviewing thirty years of international DRR and CCA development, Wen et al. (2023) find the same pattern across countries as diverse as China, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom, with the two fields consistently addressed independently, separated by institutional and administrative boundaries at every level. In 2021, UNDRR published dedicated guidance on coherence between the two planning processes precisely because parallel rather than complementary outputs had become the norm. The 8th Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, held in 2025, amplified calls for governance that addresses risk across sectors. The bridges are being built, but the underlying architecture remains largely unchanged. Closing that gap requires more than political commitment. It requires deliberate adjustments to how national programs are designed, how financing is structured, and how regional cooperation is organized. The answer does not lie in merging ministries or rewriting international frameworks. It lies in making smarter use of what already exists. The most practical entry point is institutional. When countries respond to a major disaster, they do not operate in isolation. They bring relevant institutions under one roof to coordinate decisions, resources, and actions. The same logic should guide the design of national programs. Establishing joint mechanisms that connect DRR and CCA institutions at the national level, with a clear mandate to coordinate planning, consolidate financing proposals, align data systems, and develop common monitoring frameworks with standardized indicators, would reduce duplication without structural overhaul. In practice, many regulatory and planning instruments, including land use management, building codes, and infrastructure standards, already address the objectives of both agendas simultaneously. Enforcing them coherently, rather