The Threat List

Status:Health

The Threat List
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GlobalHealthDeep-sourcedhigh confidence

Global Hunger and Food Insecurity

Hundreds of millions face chronic undernourishment; tens of millions face emergency or famine conditions.

Severity score

86.4

Catastrophic · default weighting

Trajectory

Worsening

How this is ranked

What this is

Chronic hunger and acute food insecurity persist at levels well above pre-pandemic baselines, driven by conflict, climate shocks, currency crises and disrupted supply chains. Child wasting and stunting account for a large share of the mortality burden, and hunger acts as a force multiplier on nearly every other crisis on this index. Famine determinations are technical and lagging, so acute deaths are systematically undercounted.

Score breakdown

Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.

Loss of life

94

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

98

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

85

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

55

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

84

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.

Recent coverage

Audit trail

Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.

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