World hunger is an environmental issue because the systems that produce, distribute, and waste food are among the largest drivers of deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, water depletion, and biodiversity loss on the planet. At the same time, the environmental damage caused by these food systems circles back to make hunger worse, as climate change, degraded soil, and polluted waterways reduce the amount of food the earth can produce. Roughly 673 million people experienced hunger in 2024, and the forces keeping that number high are deeply entangled with the health of the planet.
Food Production Drives Deforestation
Agricultural expansion is responsible for almost 90 percent of global deforestation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. More than half of all forest loss comes from converting forest into cropland, and livestock grazing accounts for nearly 40 percent. These aren’t small, incremental losses. Tropical forests in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa are being cleared at enormous scale to grow commodity crops like soy, palm oil, and cattle pasture, often to feed global supply chains rather than local populations.
Forests act as carbon sinks, pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it. When they’re burned or cleared, that stored carbon is released. So the very act of expanding farmland to grow more food accelerates climate change, which in turn threatens future harvests through more extreme droughts, floods, and heat waves. The hunger problem and the deforestation problem feed each other.
Agriculture’s Greenhouse Gas Footprint
Global agricultural emissions totaled roughly 10.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2021. The three primary gases involved are carbon dioxide from land clearing and machinery, methane from livestock digestion and rice paddies, and nitrous oxide from synthetic fertilizers. That overall figure has actually declined slightly since the early 1990s, largely because deforestation rates slowed in some regions. But emissions from livestock, fertilizer use, and irrigation have continued to climb, offsetting some of those gains.
Livestock production is especially resource-intensive. Beef requires between 8,700 and 15,400 cubic meters of water per ton, compared to about 1,600 cubic meters for grains. The land and water devoted to raising animals for meat could, in many cases, produce far more calories if used for crops eaten directly by people. This inefficiency means the food system uses more of the planet’s resources than it needs to, generating more emissions per calorie delivered to a plate.
Water Scarcity and Farming
Agriculture is the single largest consumer of freshwater on Earth. The commonly cited figure is that irrigation accounts for about 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawals, though recent analysis suggests the true number could range anywhere from 45 to 90 percent depending on the region and how withdrawals are measured. Either way, food production dominates the planet’s freshwater budget.
This matters for hunger because aquifers and rivers are finite. In parts of India, sub-Saharan Africa, and the American West, groundwater is being pumped faster than rainfall can replenish it. As water tables drop and droughts intensify with a warming climate, farmers lose the ability to irrigate. Crop yields fall, food prices rise, and the communities most dependent on local agriculture are the ones who go hungry first. Water scarcity isn’t a separate crisis from hunger. It’s the same crisis.
Fertilizer Runoff and Ocean Dead Zones
To grow enough food for nearly 8 billion people, farmers apply enormous quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers. When rain washes these nutrients off fields and into rivers, they flow downstream to coastal waters, where they trigger explosive growth of algae and cyanobacteria. When those blooms die and decompose, the process consumes so much oxygen that the water can no longer support marine life. The result is a “dead zone,” an area of ocean where fish, shrimp, and other organisms either flee or suffocate.
There are possibly as many as a thousand dead zones along coastlines worldwide, with the second largest in the Baltic Sea and one of the most studied in the Gulf of Mexico, fed by fertilizer runoff from farms across the Mississippi River basin. These dead zones devastate coastal fishing communities that depend on the ocean for both food and income. So the same fertilizers that boost crop yields on land can destroy a protein source at sea, shifting the hunger problem rather than solving it.
Biodiversity Loss Weakens Food Systems
Converting forests and grasslands into farmland doesn’t just release carbon. It destroys habitat. Research published in Nature Sustainability estimates that land-use change since 1995 has committed roughly 1.5 percent of all global species to eventual extinction, with Southeast Asia and the Pacific (38 percent of the impact), Latin America and the Caribbean (36 percent), and Africa (23 percent) bearing nearly all of the damage.
This loss ripples through food systems in ways that aren’t always obvious. Pollinators like bees and butterflies are essential for producing fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Healthy soil depends on a web of microorganisms, fungi, and insects that break down organic matter and cycle nutrients. When ecosystems are simplified into monoculture farms, these natural support systems weaken. Crops become more vulnerable to pests and disease, which can trigger sudden harvest failures, exactly the kind of shock that pushes vulnerable communities into acute hunger.
Food Waste Closes the Loop
A significant portion of the food the world grows never gets eaten. When that wasted food ends up in landfills, it decomposes and produces methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide over short time spans. In the United States alone, food waste makes up about 24 percent of all municipal solid waste sent to landfills, and it’s responsible for an estimated 58 percent of the methane those landfills release into the atmosphere.
This is the cruel arithmetic of the hunger-environment connection. The planet absorbs massive environmental costs to produce food: cleared forests, drained aquifers, polluted coastlines, heated atmosphere. Then a large share of that food is thrown away, generating still more environmental damage. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people don’t have enough to eat. The problem isn’t just that the world can’t grow enough food. It’s that the way food is produced, distributed, and discarded is destroying the environmental systems that future food production depends on.
Climate Change Makes Hunger Worse
The relationship between hunger and the environment runs in both directions. The environmental damage caused by food systems accelerates climate change, and climate change in turn makes it harder to grow food. Extreme weather events, including droughts, floods, and heat waves, are becoming more frequent and more severe. The 2025 UN State of Food Security report specifically cited extreme weather as a driver of recent food price inflation and persistent hunger in Africa and western Asia.
Rising temperatures stress staple crops during critical growth phases. Shifting rainfall patterns leave some regions parched and others flooded at the wrong time. Warmer oceans reduce fish stocks. These aren’t distant projections. They’re patterns already visible in harvest data and food prices around the world. The communities least responsible for global emissions, smallholder farmers in tropical regions, are often the most exposed to these changes and the least equipped to adapt. That imbalance is why world hunger can’t be solved without addressing the environmental systems it’s embedded in.