The IPC Classification System distinguishes and links acute food insecurity, chronic food insecurity, and acute malnutrition to support more strategic and better-coordinated responses.
Overview
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) is an innovative multi-partner initiative for improving food security and nutrition analysis and decision-making. By using the IPC classification and analytical approach, Governments, UN Agencies, NGOs, civil society and other relevant actors, work together to determine the severity and magnitude of acute and chronic food insecurity, and acute malnutrition situations in a country, according to internationally-recognized scientific standards.
The protocols used by the IPC are harmonized across the three individual scales (IPC Acute Food Insecurity, IPC Chronic Food Insecurity, and IPC Acute Malnutrition). This allows for the analysis of linkages between the three conditions and the possibility of detangling acute food insecurity, chronic food insecurity, and acute malnutrition, in support of more strategic response analysis.
The main goal of the IPC is to provide decision-makers with a rigorous, evidence- and consensus-based analysis of food insecurity and acute malnutrition situations, to inform emergency responses as well as medium- and long-term policy and programming.
IPC is:
A common global system for classifying the severity and magnitude of the food insecurity and malnutrition situation and identifying its key drivers
A platform for building evidence-based technical consensus among key stakeholders
A process that consolidates wide-ranging evidence into knowledge for taking action towards food security and nutrition
For more information visit the IPC website or subscribe to IPC alerts
Outputs/Resources
- Explore IPC data on the Humanitarian Data Exchange
- IPC Population Tracking Tool (a new online platform that gives the public access to population data from more than 30 different countries. It allows users to download resource data for offline IPC analyses from the past three years. All national population figures are based on official country population estimates. IPC estimates are those published in country IPC reports)
- Webinar recording (note: 225mb) from HDX Dataset Deep Dive and related slides
- Guidance from IPC visualization: