A global trend towards increasing weather-related disasters was confirmed in 2008, the second deadliest year in the past decade for natural catastrophes, this year's World Disasters Report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.

Shortages of food, starvation and famine are often the most devastating consequences of a disaster.

Here are some highlights about food security from the report:

• It is estimated that the number of people facing a food emergency has doubled since 2006 to 220 million because of natural hazards or conflict.

• Although there has been some progress in preventing a repeat of the mass starvation that gripped the Horn of Africa in the mid-1980s, a similar pattern of food crises continues to cause suffering.

• Early warning systems to prevent famine have improved in the last 30 years, but there has been a "damaging tendency" by the authorities to wait until the situation becomes critical before reacting. Emergency aid is made available too late and on a short-term basis with the focus on saving lives rather than protecting livelihoods.

Despite the challenges, there have been some innovative approaches to predicting food shortages:

• Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC): identifies five main phases of food insecurity and provides a scale comparable across countries and different seasons to make it easier for donors, agencies and governments to identify priorities for intervention. Piloted in several countries in east and central Africa with varying degrees of success.

• Livelihoods-based interventions and Livestock Emergency Guidelines (LEGS): aims to protect people's assets and to support local markets and services needed for recovery after a disaster. For example, in 2006 the USAID-funded Pastoralist Livelihoods Initiative responded to drought in Ethiopia by linking livestock traders to herders. During the drought, pastoralist communities were able to sell their livestock and use the money to buy food.

• Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP): aims to shift the focus away from launching regular emergency appeals to providing longer-term solutions for those affected by chronic hunger. Introduced by the Ethiopian government in 2006, jointly with the World Food Programme and the World Bank, the programme uses a mix of cash and food-for-work to help households bridge periods of hunger without having to sell scarce assets to survive.