TREESHOCK · Trees to mitigate effects of shocks on food security

Climate change exacerbates the frequency and magnitude of disasters (e.g., floods, droughts, cyclones). These shocks are threatening food security, with especially severe effects on the poorest and most vulnerable households. This is worrisome as two billion people already suffer from malnutrition, leading to a range of negative health outcomes. Exploring pathways to support resilience and adaptation to such disasters is critical to mitigate negative impacts on the food security of affected households. Trees inside and outside of forests offer a promising, yet overlooked avenue to increase household resilience and buffer negative impacts of climate-related disasters and other types of shocks. Recent research has established that forests could buffer the impacts of climate-related disasters on household food security. Yet, these studies suffer from lack of pre- and post-disaster data, preventing causal explanations. There is no broad-scale study that uses pre-and post-disaster household data to quantify the extent to which trees inside and outside of forests mitigate the effects of climate-related disasters on food security, across different ecosystems and geographies. Studies have also not yet been able to account for compound effects where climate-related disasters occur simultaneously with other types of shocks, such as conflicts and institutional upheavals. Finally, existing research has been unable to tease apart mechanisms that explain how proximity of forests buffers climate-related disasters. TREESHOCK has the ambitious objective to bring together fields that currently mostly operate in isolation, including climate change adaptation, humanitarian aid, and biodiversity conservation. The project will provide generalizable evidence to inform where climate adaptation and landscape restoration programs are most needed in countries facing the triple challenge of natural disasters, forest loss, and high rates of malnutrition.