More than 150 academics, business leaders and food groups have told Andy Burnham's government that Britain has no plan to feed people in a crisis. The official measures so far target household cupboards, so buffer stock along the supply chain stays each food business's own cost.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap
- Insufficient
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
Cambridge researchers' open-source Tessera model mapped crops in Senegal's groundnut basin correctly 84% of the time on a fraction of the usual labeled data. For agencies that can afford field surveys only every few years, the more useful result is that its maps held up best when trained on one year and applied to another.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives50
- Confidence45
Japan is buying back 210,000 tons of rice to refill its reserves after private stocks swung from 1.5 million to 2.43 million tons in two years. The purchase covers about half the stock above the normal 2 million tons, so prices can keep falling from their 2025 peak.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives30
- Confidence55
A PNAS reconstruction of 23 years of satellite gravity data finds regional freshwater storage trends 33 percent stronger than earlier estimates on average, and 45 percent stronger where farms pump aquifers.
Reality
- Evidence66
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives38
- Confidence62
The probability describes a ranking of Pacific ocean temperature, and the December peak it points to arrives for Southeast Asian governments that have already been drawing down reserves to cover energy and fertilizer.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives40
- Confidence52
ABARES has Australia's winter harvest 16 percent above its ten-year average, about 8.4 million tonnes above it, and what remains uncertain is finish rain, southern frost dates and how much nitrogen growers could afford.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives60
- Confidence45
SINTEF's look at the Gardermoen facility run by Coop Norge and Avisomo finds the commercial case sitting in keeping quality, while the four other Norwegian growers it visited still run robots alongside hands.
Reality
- Evidence34
- Adoption30
- Hype gap+32
- Incentives72
- Confidence42
An ALLFED preprint ran two 100-year simulations under 2C of warming, one with the Atlantic circulation forced down and one left alone, then layered wheat, maize and rice models on top of both. It has not been peer reviewed.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives62
- Confidence58
Florian Jehn argues that national registers already name volcanoes and solar storms, then stop the worst case at around a thousand deaths, so the scenario that actually starves people never gets planned for. He proposes three fixes that exist today.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives58
- Confidence40
Boyce Thompson Institute researchers report that ascaroside 18 leaves defense genes easier to switch on, and that field sprays cut fungal disease in corn and soybean. Three of the four named leads co-founded the startup behind it.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+32
- Incentives78
- Confidence44
The forecast signal is stronger than anything in the record since 1950. The observation underneath it is 1.4C, and that gap is the part worth watching.
Reality
- Evidence56
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+32
- Incentives44
- Confidence47
A study of six crop groups covering roughly half of internationally traded calories finds economic inequality the strongest constraint on food accessibility, ahead of production shocks.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives44
- Confidence46
Roughly half the world eats because of synthetic nitrogen, and the plants that make it run on gas. The alternatives on offer are agronomic and biological, and they scale slowly.
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption20
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives55
- Confidence35