Vulnerability and food insecurity in the light of climate change: a comprehensive framework for the household context

Agrifood systems are relevant contributors to climate change and additional ecological pressures like biodiversity loss, while also being affected by them. Recent disruptive events, such as the Covid-19 crisis, the war in Ukraine and the rise of climate extreme events, have revealed structural vulnerabilities that hinder the capacity of these systems to provide healthy and nutritious diets, particularly for the most vulnerable populations. As a result, household food security has become a focal research point in the Global North, leading to the emergence of diverse concepts and methodologies to capture the complexity underlying agrifood vulnerabilities and, in turn, food insecurity. While such concepts capture many complex dynamics, none of them provides a complete picture. This highlights the need for a framework that provides the full range of factors and interactions contributing to household food insecurity, with careful attention to contextualisation and intersectional approaches. Building on an exhaustive literature review, this paper proposes such an integrated framework and argues that household food insecurity emerges from overlapping and interconnected drivers stemming from multiple dimensions.