By Lisa Palmer, Senior Fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center and Author of HOT, HUNGRY PLANET (St. Martin’s Press; May 9, 2017)

The UN predicts Earth will have more than 9.6 billion people by 2050. With resources already scarce, how will we feed them all? It’s one of the urgent challenges we face in the coming decades, when billions more people will be sitting down at the global table wondering what’s for dinner—or even if there is dinner. Further, how do we feed this growing world population without harming our natural resources? And how can we deal with the perils we face without truly understanding them? Farms and communities all over the world are already working to develop strategies to help them adapt and adjust to the effects of their changing environments including extreme heat, more frequent droughts, and extreme weather.

In my new book, Hot, Hungry Planet: The Fight to Stop a Global Food Crisis in the Face of Climate Change (St. Martin’s Press: on-sale May 9, 2017), I write about the people at the front lines who are living in and working in all parts of the world to increase global food security while reducing agriculture’s damage to our land, air, and water systems.

For the last several years, I have been reporting on the human ingenuity and innovation that will help us create a climate-smart food future. Through a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, I went to India and saw first-hand how villages are dealing with food security through a climate-tech revolution.    

In India, I saw camels pull fully loaded wooden carts of coconuts and vegetables amid speeding rickshaws, cars, buses, and motorcycles loaded with people. I saw farmers sitting on top of slow-moving oxcarts topped with grasses and other cattle feed while trucks filled with sacks of grain and goods rushed past. In many areas where I traveled—in Gujarat, Haryana, and Punjab—it appeared that rural life had not changed for decades. Upon closer inspection, that was not true at all. In fact, I found surprising advances. Farmers and entire villages were trying to reconcile the risks posed by a changing climate with their need to improve crop yields to support their families by learning new methods of planting rice and more precisely tracking how much fertilizer and irrigated water they applied to their fields. Some were even installing solar-powered irrigation pumps.

Innovations in villages and on small farms are happening in many other countries around the world, too. Small farms hold the biggest power and biggest opportunities to advance food security. But the land on the small farms of the world does not produce the amount it is capable of. By improving access to seeds and fertilizers and investing in strategies that help farmers adapt to a changing climate and develop their access to markets, yields can improve, and so can nutrition.

While in India, I visited several so-called “climate smart” villages, which are now in roughly 1,100 locations, that seek to provide practical adaptation options to increase security and resilience in places that face an uncertain future. Climate-smart villages are also being developed and rolled out in Southeast Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and Latin America. The projects are coordinated by the Climate Change and Food Security (CCAFS) program at the CGIAR centers and many international partners and agencies. Scores of other projects globally are working to understand the problems, develop solutions, and advance crop yields, soils fertility, and agronomic practices.

At the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), where I am a senior fellow, researchers from academia, government, NGOs, and the business sector come together to accelerate collaboration leading to scientific discovery. SESYNC brings together the science of the natural world with the science of human behavior and decision-making to find solutions to complex environmental problems. Teams of researchers are increasingly focused on food and the food-energy-water nexus. Science teams collaborate on a variety of issues including water resources management, land management, agriculture, food security and fisheries, trade, and other areas of study, with the goal of scholarship that will inform decisions.

One of the next frontiers will be to measure how well we are able to improve the quality of diets in the world’s neediest places while also building sustainable and productive food systems. I will chair a solutions-oriented panel discussion on this topic on March 29, as part of the Global Food Security Symposium hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. This pre-Symposium side event will explore themes including food security, nutrition and diet quality, tracking development progress, and sustainable and productive food systems. This Solution Session discussion, called Measuring Improvements of Diet Quality While Building Sustainable & Productive Food Systems, will offer opportunities for productive dialogue and will result in an outcome document.

Pablo Diego-Rosell, Senior Consultant from Gallup, Anne Kepple, Food Security and Nutrition Specialist at FAO, and additional representatives from the Food and Agriculture division of the Germany Embassy and PATH will join me for the discussion.

I hope you will take part in the session, which will take place March 29 from 2:00 to 4:00 pm.

In the coming decades, the biggest advances in eliminating hunger gap will occur when we apply our best knowledge and tools and integrate them with data, ideas, and strategies for producing and increasing access to nutritious food. Indicators show that we are overusing our resources, and we are still not meeting the needs of a hungry world population. Join us for a discussion on how we can improve diets and end hunger without irreparably harming the natural resources that allow us to do so.