A new app details where your food comes from — and just how fragile the global food system really is

After having founded the Better Planet Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021, Zia Mehrabi, one of a handful of scientists studying the intersection of food insecurity and climate change, quickly found itself to use a constant flow of calls for political decision -makers and peers. Everyone wanted a more quantitative overview of how extreme weather events affect food supply chains and contribute to hunger in the world. But Mehrabi found the economic puzzle difficult to resolve due to available public information available. What he could easily find mainly analyzed each disturbance in isolation, focusing on a specific part of the world. It did not take into account the expansive flow of goods on the global markets or the effects of composition of climate change on the supply chain – and it had to be laboriously exploited from occasional reports and case studies.

Thus, when the genome of the non -profit land, which builds data and resources focused on a more sustainable planet, approached Mehrabi to collaborate in the development of his vision of a digital food supply card, he jumped on occasion. When their American prototype proved to be success, they became global.

The resulting application, which launched Thursday and was shared exclusively with Grist, identifies the flows of food through almost all the main ports, roads, rails and shipping routes around the world and traces the goods where they are ultimately consumed. The developers have crowned it a “digital twin of the global food system” and hope that it will be used by decision -makers and researchers who work to better adapt to an increasingly fragile supply chain besieged by climate change. The model identifies the critical strangulation points of global transport where disturbances, such as extreme weather conditions, would have domino effects on food security and, in doing so, identifies opportunities for local and regional agricultural producers to take an avant-garde basic foot.

“Food is so important to us,” said Mehrabi. “It is necessary to build these systems, these digital food twins which can be used in decision -making contexts. The first step to do is to build the data. “

The model is a “first of its kind”, according to Alla Semenova, economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland who was not involved in the development of the project. The tool makes clear the interconnected nature of the global food supply system and “underlines the importance of government policies aimed at supporting diversified and localized food production systems,” she said.

Food systems do not work independently. Seeds that push life in fallow terrains at the very moment when a buyer buys a well -packaged of a local seller, the supply chain connects producers, consumers, workers, processors, regulators, analysts, drivers and retailers in a complex web. It is a network that extends beyond borders and water bodies, connecting people and places around the world. This complexity also makes our understanding of the training effect of climatic disturbances through the intrinsically fragmented planet’s food system.

The card tries to give meaning to the tangled labyrinth of food supply chains around the world. It offers a detailed view of the quantity of the most common agricultural food groups – from cereals and oils to dairy products, eggs and meat – exported outside states, districts and municipalities. Other elements integrated into its data repository measure the total economic impact of the supply chain on people and food accessibility in a region, counting the size of its agricultural sector, average annual economic production, population size and human health measures, standard of living and education. The tool also calculates the total mass, calories and macronutrient content of all culture, aquatic and farming products that flow in and out of a place. It also illustrates commercial data for nearly 3,800 regions in 240 countries.

The model also visualizes critical strangulation points where disturbances, such as extreme weather conditions, would have cascade effects on these product flows. In the data, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Turkish Strait, the Malacca Strait, the Black Sea and a relatively small number of ports, the interior waterways and the rail networks in the United States and Brazil are all distinguished like bottles of Bottlower, key sea passages and ignoring points on the ribs and considerable global food trade.

It can even be used proactively to assess how a corresponding series of climatic shocks on a trade route is measured in calories, protein or critical micronutrients – all leading references for food insecurity, said Mehrabi. About 9% of the global routes in the supply chain – less than 350 – represent 80% of global calorie flows.

The United States is not isolated from the effects of extreme weather shocks on the food system. It is important about 128 megatons of food from around 154 countries around the world, which represents approximately a third of the country’s food supply, according to an analysis by Better Planet Laboratory Data Scientist, Ginni Braich. Some of its main imports, including bananas, coffee, olive oil, cocoa beans and oranges, are faced with risks linked to the most imminent climate.

Likewise, if a series of simultaneous and destabilizing climatic shocks struck one of the main wheat exporters in Australia-Western, rice power in India in Uttar Pradesh and Paraná, Brazil, which is among the largest exporters of the Sobeans planet, it could disrupt food supplies and affect food needs tens of millions of people. These regions have already experienced extreme times in recent years. In 2023, some parts of the state of Australia-Western were confronted with the lowest annual precipitation recorded since 1900, temperatures above average, and everything, waves of serious heat to the conditions of danger of catastrophic fires and significant flames. The Uttar Pradesh experienced extreme weather events over 167 days of 2024 – against 119 days of the previous year – while periods of strong precipitation flooded paraná sections and droughts have dried up rivers across Brazil.

According to open source data that the team has published with the card, serious disruption of food exports of these three regions could affect calories which support more than a million people in the United States and Mexico and 55 million people in China for a year. The cascade effects would be most strongly felt by low -income households in these places which are already struggling with food access.

Given the implications for food security, the Mehrabi team has heard several groups interested in understanding how the tool could be used to help governments prepare emergency food reserves. The initial American prototype aroused the interest of officials from the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden Administration, in particular the former special envoy for global food security Cary Fowler.

Fowler told Grist that when he was in the State Department, his office had “a number of interactions” with the team behind the card while they developed it. “I thought then and I now think that this approach is very promising by helping us to understand and analyze large amounts of data and complex relationships,” said Fowler. “As these tools are improved, I can imagine that they will catalyze new ideas and help develop the program and policies. They could potentially provide us with an “early warning” where the problems of the food system are broken in crisis. “

Despite its clear advantages, the card has certain limits. It does not show which specific agricultural products a place can import Or where the food of residents comes from. (Although the developers say that this can be used from data.) The card shows where food circulates according to the cheapest track estimates to transport food and satellite data on known routes – and not, for example, the precise number of trucks or rail cars, or port capacities. And unlike its American predecessor, the tool has no integrated model that different climatic shocks and extreme weather events could do food availability in an area.

“We are not directly in competition with a very specific use case for something like” How much do you store a warehouse? ” “, Said Mehrabi of the limits of the model. “This is not what we are trying to do … Our goal is from a humanitarian point of view.”

And this appears in the way the tool visualizes the fragility of the current food system, according to the creative technologist of Earth Genome, Cameron Kruse. Although their initial American model has shown that only 5.5% of the country’s total counties produce half of the country’s food, this world image is even more concentrated, he said. Only 1.2% of world countries are responsible for half of all exports of interior wheat, exposing critical vulnerabilities in the global food supply. It also seems the alarm on the global effects of localized disturbances of transport and provides a framework for future simulations which could predict the effects of climatic shocks.

“As long as these models remain partitioned and isolated, they continue to grow and isolated,” said Kruse. “If you hear about a drought in the news, or if you hear about certain hurricanes who have an impact on a region, go to this region in food twin, and see where this region produces food. And then consult the news and see if the world leaders are talking about it,” he said. “Use this as almost an intestinal verification like,” do we focus on the right problems? “”

Publisher’s note: Cary Fowler is a former donor from Grist. Donors have no role in the editorial decisions of Grist.