Navigating climate challenges: the relationship between climate risk and food security in Africa and Asia

Climate change is a global challenge and highly affects agriculture, particularly in Africa and Asia. These regions rely on agriculture as the main driver of their economies, making them highly vulnerable to climate-related risks. This research aims to forecast the Climate Risk Index (CRI) and Global Food Security Index (GFSI), and to analyse the impact of food security on climate risk. ARIMA Box-Jenkins models were employed to forecast the values of CRI and GFSI, while Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) models were applied to analyse the impact of food security on climate risk. Furthermore, the Dumitrescu-Hurlin Causality test was used to examine the causal linkage between two indices. The result of the ARIMA projection shows the upward trend in climate risk in both regions, while food security shows an increasing trend but a declining trend in North Africa. Moreover, the Panel ARDL analysis reveals a significant long-run negative relationship between GFSI and CRI, while in the short run, the relationship varies across regions in Africa and Asia. The Dumitrescu-Hurlin Causality test shows a one-way linkage from CRI to GFSI, which suggests that the rise of climate risk drives changes in food security. The findings of this study emphasise the importance of climate adaptation policies, particularly focusing on the resilience of the agricultural sector. This study suggests integrating efforts to improve food security with climate risk mitigation strategies, which is useful for minimising the impacts of climate change in the long term.