The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
GCRI · Established platform
Food-system security and resilience from land and production through supply chains, nutrition and access. Food Nexus is an established platform published by The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation.
On the map below
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Crop condition
Soil water and rain
Heat, fire and flood
Land cover
3D columns: nexus exposure per hexagon
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Natural Earth
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Crop greenness and growth, root-zone soil water, rain, heat, burning, floods, cropland and long-term water risk to farming, each dated.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them; indicators of growing conditions, not yield, production or food security assessments; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
Layers and dates
Food system risk is the chance that a shock at one link of the food system, from soil and water to trade, storage and household incomes, leaves people without enough safe and nutritious food. Food Nexus follows each link: production, soil and land, water and energy, storage and cold chain, markets, innovation and shocks, naming the indicators, open data and methods for each and the authorities that act.
Agricultural scientists; farmers; food processors; nutrition specialists; logistics experts.
Crop and climate analysis; supply-dependency mapping; food-access indicators.
Food-system vulnerability briefs; agrifood dependency maps; resilience methods.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Food security | A situation in which all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food for an active and healthy life, as defined at the World Food Summit. |
| Food system | All the activities, actors and resources involved in producing, storing, processing, trading, consuming and disposing of food, and the outcomes they produce. |
| Acute food insecurity | Food insecurity severe enough to threaten lives or livelihoods at a given time, classified in five phases by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. |
| Yield gap | The difference between the yield farmers achieve and the yield attainable with the best adapted varieties and management under the same climate and soil. |
| Food loss | Food that leaves the supply chain between harvest and retail, distinct from food waste at retail, food service and household level. |
The working screen behind this platform: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Crop, livestock and aquaculture production systems.
TopicAvailability, affordability and nutrition.
TopicSoil health, land degradation and productivity.
TopicWater and energy demand in production.
TopicRefrigeration, logistics and food safety.
TopicPrecision agriculture, biotechnology and technology safeguards.
TopicImport concentration, prices and trade routes.
TopicDisease, drought, conflict and supply disruption.
A question becomes evidence, a governed build, an organized community, a controlled test, a reviewed publication and, finally, a decision taken by the competent authority under its own rules.
Food Nexus studies food systems as chains of dependency: the soils, water, energy and inputs that set production; the storage, logistics and trade that move food; and the prices, incomes and diets that decide whether people can eat well. Its pages set out the science, the data, the methods and the decisions for each link, and show how a shock at one link travels to the others. Every indicator is named with its unit and evidence label, never with a value.
Crops, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture, the gaps between potential and actual yields, and the weather, pests and inputs that move output from season to season.
Soil health, erosion, salinisation and land degradation, and the land-use change and tenure arrangements that decide how productive land stays.
Irrigation, pumping, fertiliser manufacture, processing and cooling as demands on water and power that rise together under heat and drought.
Availability, access, utilisation and stability, measured from household experience, diets and prices up to national and global supply balances.
Import dependence, exporter concentration, chokepoints, price transmission and the trade policies that widen or damp a shock.
Post-harvest storage, refrigeration, transport and food safety controls that decide how much harvested food reaches people, and in what condition.
Precision agriculture, breeding, biotechnology and digital services, and the biosafety, data and access safeguards that govern them.
Drought, flood, pests, animal disease, conflict and supply disruption, and how each propagates across production, trade, prices and access.
A food system is a chain of biological, physical and economic processes. Each link has its own exposure, and a shock at one link travels to the others through stocks, prices and logistics.
Production starts in soil and water. Crop yields depend on temperature, rainfall timing, soil organic matter, nutrients, pests and the crop variety in the ground. Livestock and aquaculture depend on feed, water quality, animal health and heat. A drought during flowering, a new strain of plant disease or an outbreak in livestock can remove a large part of a harvest in one season, and degraded soils take years to recover.
After the farm gate, food moves through aggregation, processing, storage, transport and retail. These stages rely on energy, refrigeration, packaging, finance and labour. Many countries meet a large share of their staple needs through imports that pass through a few ports, straits and exporting regions, so a disruption far away becomes a price rise at home.
Households then meet food through income and markets. When prices rise faster than wages, people buy less nutritious food, sell productive assets or skip meals, and the effects on child growth and health last long after the shock. This is why food crises tend to be crises of access and affordability as much as of supply, and why failures cascade: a harvest shortfall, an export restriction, a fuel price spike and a currency fall can reinforce one another.
Food Nexus turns agricultural, climate, trade and nutrition evidence into material that public institutions, producers and researchers can use and check.
Seasonal and long-run assessment of production exposure, using observation, field data and models, with stated uncertainty.
Where a country's staples, inputs and feed come from, which routes they use and where concentration creates exposure.
Measures of availability, affordability and diet quality that show who is exposed when supply or prices move.
The platform is designed for agricultural scientists, farmers and producer organizations, food processors, nutrition specialists, logistics experts and the public institutions that plan food security. GCRI does not regulate, certify or approve; its findings carry their methods and uncertainty.
Food Nexus stewards the method page for agricultural, soil and food science and applies nine further methods held across the Consortium, including Earth observation and remote sensing, hydrology and water science, forecasting and time-series analysis, econometrics and optimization and operations research. Each is listed on the platform STEM foundation.
Its work feeds the Nexus Foundry systems for Earth observation, GRIx risk data, decision support and anticipatory action, and the report series Global Sector Risk and Resilience, Country Systems Risk and Resilience and Evidence Brief.
The same field is governed and financed elsewhere in the Consortium. At The Global Risks Forum (GRF), Climate and Nature Governance and the Diplomacy Nexus convene the institutions that decide on land, climate and trade. At The Global Risks Alliance (GRA), Insurance Nexus, Climate and Nature Financial Risk and Reinsurance and Catastrophe build shared industry understanding of agricultural and climate risk, without advising on or arranging any transaction. All counterparts are listed on counterparts across the Consortium.
Every claim on Food Nexus rests on methods with a canonical page in the STEM Commons, so readers can see what a finding depends on and where its limits lie.
The platform does not set standards. It reads its evidence against the frameworks that competent bodies have adopted, so a finding can be placed where a decision-maker already works.
| Framework or standard | Body | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Sustainable Development Goal 2 and its indicators | United Nations, with FAO as custodian of most indicators | Targets and definitions for hunger, food insecurity, malnutrition, smallholder productivity, genetic diversity and food price anomalies |
| Codex Alimentarius | FAO and WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission | International food standards, hygiene codes of practice and maximum limits for contaminants and residues, referenced in trade |
| Integrated Food Security Phase Classification technical manual | IPC Global Partnership | Protocols and phase scales for classifying acute food insecurity, chronic food insecurity and acute malnutrition |
| WTO Agreement on Agriculture and the SPS Agreement | World Trade Organization | Rules on market access, domestic support and export competition, and on sanitary and phytosanitary measures in trade |
| Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Adequate Food | FAO Council | Guidance for states on progressively realising the right to adequate food through national food security policy |
| Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure | Committee on World Food Security | Principles for governing tenure of land, fisheries and forests, including recognition of legitimate customary rights |
| International Plant Protection Convention | FAO, IPPC Secretariat | International standards for phytosanitary measures to prevent the introduction and spread of plant pests |
| Terrestrial and Aquatic Animal Health Codes | World Organisation for Animal Health | Standards for surveillance, notification and control of animal diseases, and for safe trade in animals and their products |
| Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety | Convention on Biological Diversity | Procedures for risk assessment and transboundary movement of living modified organisms |
| Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction | UNDRR | Targets and priorities for reducing disaster losses, with direct agricultural loss among the indicators reported |
GCRI studies a field as science, GRF governs it and GRA builds shared financial understanding of it. Food Nexus links to its counterparts so that work on one side is visible on the others.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.