Local decision-makers can easily be overwhelmed by the complexity of food systems and of the potential climate impacts on their key elements and interlinkages. There is thus a need for a tool to systematically assess the risks to the key factors that underpin food security posed by climate variability and change. This will help to develop actions that strengthen the climate resilience of food systems and to identify indicators that measure changes in resilience over time. CRiSTAL Food Security, a specialized version of the Community-based Risk Screening Tool – Adaptation and Livelihoods (CRiSTAL), seeks to address this gap.

CRiSTAL Food Security is a decision-support tool created along with a user's manual to support climate resilience of food systems at the community level. It aims to help users to understand the key elements of a community food system and their sensitivity to climate variability and change; the resilience of food system elements to climate variability and change, and how to improve it; and what indicators can help monitor the evolution of community food system resilience over time. CRiSTAL Food Security is mainly targeted at local-level decision-makers, such as municipal or district-level government staff, project managers of development organizations and local community leaders. The tool consists of a series of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and produces as a main output a series of automatically generated reports based on information entered into the spreadsheets. This manual guides users through each analytical step of the CRiSTAL Food Security tool.

To download the tool, please click here here.
To download the manual, please click here.

Further reading:

Project homepage: Climate Resilience and Food Security in Central America
Project overview: Climate Resilience and Food Security in Central America
Working paper: Climate Resilience and Food Security: A framework for planning and monitoring
Tool: Food Security Indicator & Policy Analysis Tool and User’s Manual

Blogs:

• Making Food Systems More Resilient to Climate Change
• Institutional synergies and food security: the case of the “Giant Mountains” community in Guatemala (Spanish)
• Resilience and Adaptation of Food Systems in Puerto Morazán, Nicaragua (Spanish)
• Three Metre Storm Surges Threaten the Food Security of a Community in Cedeño, Honduras (Spanish)
• Climate Resilience and Food Security: Salado Barra’s experience in Honduras