Author: sHq_LoGiNz

NEW YORK, July 21, 2026 /3BL/ – The 2026 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report was released today by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and UNICEF. The report is the leading annual benchmark on global hunger, food access, and the affordability of healthy diets. Rotimy Djossaya, Chief Impact Officer with Action Against Hunger, available for interviews to discuss the findings.

The 2026 SOFI report, “Understanding and Addressing the High Costs of a Healthy Diet,” puts global hunger at 645 million people, 7.8% of the world’s population. This is a decrease of just 14 million from 2025’s estimate of 720 million. That decline is concentrated in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia; it does not reflect what is happening in Africa, where 309 million people, or 1 in 5, are hungry and 66.6% cannot afford a healthy diet. Without a sharp course correction, which includes reversing aid cuts, addressing conflict, and investing in climate-resilient food systems, the modest gains recorded elsewhere will not hold, and Africa’s trajectory will continue to worsen.

This year’s report also lands amid a prolonged funding crisis for humanitarian nutrition programs. In early 2025, the United States terminated roughly 90% of its foreign aid contracts, including $1.4 billion in emergency nutrition funding, and the effects are still unfolding. More than 13 million children across West and Central Africa alone are projected to suffer from malnutrition in 2026 as aid cuts push millions deeper into hunger. Supply chains for treatments like ready-to-use therapeutic food remain disrupted, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continues to push up global food prices, adding further risk for children already on the edge.

Key findings:

• For the first time on record, Africa has more hungry people than Asia: 309 million, or 1 in 5 people, compared with 292 million (6%) in Asia. Latin America and the Caribbean stand at 4.8% (32 million); Oceania at 8% (3.7 million).
• Africa’s hunger population has nearly doubled since 2010, from 171 million to 309 million in 2025, driven by conflict, displacement, climate shocks, and economic instability in countries including Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Nigeria.
• Nearly one in three people worldwide (32.7%) cannot afford a healthy diet. In Africa, that figure is two in three (66.6%) – more than double the rate in Asia (28.9%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (25.7%).
• Official Development Assistance from DAC donor countries fell 23.1% in 2025 compared with 2024. Action Against Hunger was forced to close more than 50 projects across 20 countries as a result, cutting services to hundreds of thousands of people, most of them in Africa. In Madagascar, the organization closed 3 of its 5 sub-bases and 10 mobile clinics stopped operating, affecting treatment for over 5,000 children with acute malnutrition. In Burkina Faso, 6 of 8 bases closed between 2025 and 2026.

“When 645 million people are hungry, that’s cause for concern. Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that this figure doesn’t yet count the ways that rising inflation, current conflicts, El Niño and other climate shocks are making hunger even worse,” said Rotimy Djossaya, Chief Impact Officer for Action Against Hunger USA.

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Action Against Hunger leads the global movement to end hunger. We innovate solutions, advocate for change, and reach 26.5 million people every year with proven hunger prevention and treatment programs. As a nonprofit that works across over 55 countries, our 8,500+ dedicated staff members partner with communities to address the root causes of hunger, including climate change, conflict, inequity, and emergencies. We strive to create a world free from hunger, for everyone, for good.

Spokesperson available. 

CONTACT:
Kara Green
kgreen@actionagainsthunger.org

This article is authored by Santiago Martinez, Lab Manager & Core Refrigeration Lead, Trane Technologies.

If something still works, I don’t throw it away and buy something new. So, when I joined the Thermo King laboratory in Barcelona and saw that we were buying new refrigerant, running tests and then sending the used refrigerant to be destroyed, it didn’t sit right. It wasn’t sustainable, environmentally or financially.

We were paying twice — once for the new refrigerant and again to destroy the old one. Each time I signed off on another order, I thought: We’re throwing away something that still has value.

I knew something had to change.

The hidden waste problem in refrigerant testing

In engineering, we’re taught that system performance depends on the purity of the working fluid. As refrigerant circulates through a system, it picks up contaminants — mainly oil from the compressor and moisture from small leaks. Oil, in particular, degrades performance. It doesn’t transfer heat the way refrigerant does, so a contaminated charge won’t deliver the precision needed for certification testing.

That’s why the standard practice has always been to use new refrigerant. Clean input, reliable output. However, I’d seen a different approach work before. In an earlier role at Thermo King, I worked on marine refrigeration systems, where we routinely recovered and reused refrigerant. Marine compressors have very low oil circulation rates, so what you recover is almost clean. Road transport systems are different. Those compressors push much more oil into the system, so the recovered refrigerant is genuinely contaminated. That’s why we defaulted to buying new. Once I understood that, the next question was simple: what would it take to clean it properly?

Finding the solution in existing technology

I started talking to colleagues and suppliers and found that the technology already existed. Industrial processes can clean refrigerant and restore its chemical composition if it has shifted during recovery. That matters because refrigerant blends can separate. The most volatile components are recovered first, so unless you achieve a full recovery, the composition changes. Regeneration corrects for that.

There was some initial skepticism, but my team was open to trying something new, especially as it contributed to more sustainable practices. Together, we partnered with specialists who could remove contaminants, verify the composition and return the refrigerant for reuse. And so, our new system was born.

How the regenerative process works

Our process is straightforward, but technically rigorous at each step.

Before adopting this system as standard practice, we ran extensive side-by-side comparisons — new refrigerant against regenerated refrigerant, across multiple units and conditions. We only moved forward once the technicians working with these systems every day confirmed it performed to the same standard as new.

VIDEO: How Regenerative Refrigerant is Driving Circularity in Barcelona

Refrigerant regeneration process

1. Filling the units
The units are filled with refrigerant, using regenerated stock when available.

2. Recovery
After testing, the used refrigerant is collected, stored in 50 kg cylinders, and sent to our supplier once full.

3. Industrial cleaning
Our specialist partner removes oil, moisture and other contaminants using industrial separation equipment.

4. Composition calibration
If minor variations occur, the composition can be adjusted to match the original specifications.

5. Chromatography verification
A full chemical analysis confirms the refrigerant meets AHRI 700 standards’ purity levels. Any that do not must be destroyed, though none have failed since the process was implemented.

6. Reuse
The refrigerant is returned to the lab and reused in the testing cycle as new.

The cost and emissions impact of refrigerant regeneration

The shift to regenerative refrigerant delivered measurable benefits across three closely tracked areas.

• 5-10% – Loss per cycle, the rest stays in circulation
• 80% – Less expensive per kg than new refrigerant
• CO2e – Significantly lower emissions, we only buy new once

We now handle around 200–300 kg of refrigerant per year in the Barcelona lab. That’s a modest volume in the grand scheme of things. But the impact is visible. There’s a clear reduction in both cost and in the kilograms of new refrigerant purchased, contributing to Trane Technologies’ Gigaton Challenge — our commitment to reduce one billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from customers’ carbon footprints by 2030.

Sustainability beyond the lab

Of course, our lab is one small part of a much larger, global sustainability effort. But this work shows that meaningful change doesn’t always require a mandate or breakthrough technology. For our team in Barcelona, it started by noticing something wasteful and asking whether there was a better way.

To me, this is what circularity looks like in practice. Not as a single initiative, but as something built into our daily work, decision by decision, to challenge what’s possible for a more sustainable world.

See how we’re making sustainability scalable – Read our latest Sustainability Report

This article is authored by Santiago Martinez, Lab Manager & Core Refrigeration Lead, Trane Technologies.

If something still works, I don’t throw it away and buy something new. So, when I joined the Thermo King laboratory in Barcelona and saw that we were buying new refrigerant, running tests and then sending the used refrigerant to be destroyed, it didn’t sit right. It wasn’t sustainable, environmentally or financially.

We were paying twice — once for the new refrigerant and again to destroy the old one. Each time I signed off on another order, I thought: We’re throwing away something that still has value.

I knew something had to change.

The hidden waste problem in refrigerant testing

In engineering, we’re taught that system performance depends on the purity of the working fluid. As refrigerant circulates through a system, it picks up contaminants — mainly oil from the compressor and moisture from small leaks. Oil, in particular, degrades performance. It doesn’t transfer heat the way refrigerant does, so a contaminated charge won’t deliver the precision needed for certification testing.

That’s why the standard practice has always been to use new refrigerant. Clean input, reliable output. However, I’d seen a different approach work before. In an earlier role at Thermo King, I worked on marine refrigeration systems, where we routinely recovered and reused refrigerant. Marine compressors have very low oil circulation rates, so what you recover is almost clean. Road transport systems are different. Those compressors push much more oil into the system, so the recovered refrigerant is genuinely contaminated. That’s why we defaulted to buying new. Once I understood that, the next question was simple: what would it take to clean it properly?

Finding the solution in existing technology

I started talking to colleagues and suppliers and found that the technology already existed. Industrial processes can clean refrigerant and restore its chemical composition if it has shifted during recovery. That matters because refrigerant blends can separate. The most volatile components are recovered first, so unless you achieve a full recovery, the composition changes. Regeneration corrects for that.

There was some initial skepticism, but my team was open to trying something new, especially as it contributed to more sustainable practices. Together, we partnered with specialists who could remove contaminants, verify the composition and return the refrigerant for reuse. And so, our new system was born.

How the regenerative process works

Our process is straightforward, but technically rigorous at each step.

Before adopting this system as standard practice, we ran extensive side-by-side comparisons — new refrigerant against regenerated refrigerant, across multiple units and conditions. We only moved forward once the technicians working with these systems every day confirmed it performed to the same standard as new.

VIDEO: How Regenerative Refrigerant is Driving Circularity in Barcelona

Refrigerant regeneration process

1. Filling the units
The units are filled with refrigerant, using regenerated stock when available.

2. Recovery
After testing, the used refrigerant is collected, stored in 50 kg cylinders, and sent to our supplier once full.

3. Industrial cleaning
Our specialist partner removes oil, moisture and other contaminants using industrial separation equipment.

4. Composition calibration
If minor variations occur, the composition can be adjusted to match the original specifications.

5. Chromatography verification
A full chemical analysis confirms the refrigerant meets AHRI 700 standards’ purity levels. Any that do not must be destroyed, though none have failed since the process was implemented.

6. Reuse
The refrigerant is returned to the lab and reused in the testing cycle as new.

The cost and emissions impact of refrigerant regeneration

The shift to regenerative refrigerant delivered measurable benefits across three closely tracked areas.

• 5-10% – Loss per cycle, the rest stays in circulation
• 80% – Less expensive per kg than new refrigerant
• CO2e – Significantly lower emissions, we only buy new once

We now handle around 200–300 kg of refrigerant per year in the Barcelona lab. That’s a modest volume in the grand scheme of things. But the impact is visible. There’s a clear reduction in both cost and in the kilograms of new refrigerant purchased, contributing to Trane Technologies’ Gigaton Challenge — our commitment to reduce one billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from customers’ carbon footprints by 2030.

Sustainability beyond the lab

Of course, our lab is one small part of a much larger, global sustainability effort. But this work shows that meaningful change doesn’t always require a mandate or breakthrough technology. For our team in Barcelona, it started by noticing something wasteful and asking whether there was a better way.

To me, this is what circularity looks like in practice. Not as a single initiative, but as something built into our daily work, decision by decision, to challenge what’s possible for a more sustainable world.

See how we’re making sustainability scalable – Read our latest Sustainability Report