Kicking around in the wreck

Food systems have been dramatically transitioning over the last fifty years.At a macro-scale, food systems worldwide have shifted from predominantly rural, subsistent systems to more industrialized and consolidated systems [1], paralleling demographic, epidemiological, and nutrition transitions [2].Urbanization, global trade, and interconnected food supply chains have accompanied these transitions [3], increasing the diversity of food flows worldwide.While the world churns and food systems sufficiently do their primary job in aggregatedelivering calories to feed 8 billion people-insidious, destabilizing political and civil wars, competition, and fractured geopolitics are showing the fragility of global food systems.We witnessed similar food crises in 1972-76, 1998-2001, 2007-08, 2010-11, and most recently, in 2020-2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine-Russia war in which food prices and inflation escalated, with severe impacts on low-income countries and resource-constrained households that depend heavily on imported food [4].These constraints have resulted in a five-year upward trend in the number of people who go to bed hungry (approximately 10% of the world's population).To make matters worse, 3.1 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet [5] that meets their nutrient needs and is health protective.Overlaying these compounded crises is something much more insidious: a rapidly changing climate barreling down on us [6] and a slow recovery from a global pandemic that shuttered the world [7].Weather and climate fluctuations across time scales-from days to centuriesimpact food systems.Through anthropogenically driven changes and by increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme events, climate change threatens to intensify the cycle of poverty that disproportionately impacts many vulnerable communities [8].Extreme events can decimate local and regional food systems by impacting production, transportation, storage, market and food environment access, and the loss and waste of food.These events also put people at significant risk for severe food insecurity, and failing food systems can impact the availability and physical and economic access to safe, diverse, and healthy diets [9].Governments, the United Nations (UN), and multi and bilateral agencies often meet these calamities with the same sentiments of "never again."Still, every time the world survives another food price crisis, we are left befuddled, vulnerable, and fragile.In essence, we remain kicking around in the wreck-not taking stock in the past for what should be the future and not gathering sufficient lessons on how to be more resilient and bounce back and better from these shocks.While there is a whole range of solutions to get us out of this cyclical wreck, one such area is information.Collecting, gathering, curating, and using food and climate data can help illuminate the state of the world and help track progress and where we are falling behind.Data can also help decision-makers make informed, evidence-based, real-time decisions.However, policymakers are often in the dark about how food systems perform under duress, potential nearand long-term risks and trade-offs, and where to intervene and invest.Without data, they are flying blind.For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it remained unclear how the