Establishing Early Warning Thresholds for key Surveillance Indicators of Urban Food Security

Introduction

Historically there has been comparatively little analysis of urban humanitarian action (ALNAP, 2012) even if major disasters, such as the Port-au-Prince earthquake in 2010 have led to an understanding of the need for greater attention to preparedness, relief and recovery work for emergencies in the urban context. This comes against a backdrop of increased general warnings of another three to five big urban emergencies expected in the next 10 years (ALNAP, 2012). An important area that has not been addressed to any great extent has been the identification of, or response to, slower onset or chronic emergencies in an urban context, in particular the invisible emergencies of food security or malnutrition; something often compounded by a lack of disaggregated data in major urban areas. The intention of the IDSUE programme has been to develop an easy to use set of indicators to identify a food security or nutrition emergency in an urban context and the thresholds against which different levels of an emergency could be declared.