Welcome to another week of Shaken Not Burned! 

Most conversations about climate change still sit safely at the edges of everyday life: floods somewhere else, fires on the news, future risks that feel abstract or distant.

But food doesn’t work like that.

Food shows up,  or doesn’t,  every day. Climate impacts are having an increasing effect, in prices, in availability and what seems to quietly disappear from our shelves and never quite comes back.

In this week’s episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia spoke to Francisco Martin-Rayo, chief executive of Helios AI about how climate volatility is already reshaping the global food system,  not just through headline-grabbing disasters, but through slower, more destabilising changes that are harder to see and harder to explain.

We talked about things like “chill hours” quietly disappearing, rainfall arriving all at once instead of when crops need it, pests thriving in places they never used to, and why perennial crops like coffee, cocoa, citrus, and mango are increasingly risky bets. These aren’t shocks in the way we usually think about climate risk — they’re structural shifts that break systems that were built for a more stable world.

One of the most important ideas we discussed is that we’re no longer short of the data needed to underpin effective planning. Satellites, weather models and real-time climate information exist at a scale that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. What we’re missing is the infrastructure — financial, institutional, contractual, and political — that allows people to use that information to make different decisions.

That gap shows up everywhere. Farmers locked into crops that the banks say they will finance, not alternatives that match market need. Buyers are tied in to processing plant agreements built for climates that no longer exist. Supply chains have been optimised for price efficiency rather than resilience. Meanwhile public data institutions have been doing enormous, invisible work to keep markets functioning, until suddenly they don’t, or can’t.

We also talked about AI, but not in the abstract. Not as disruption, and not as a silver bullet. Instead, we focused on what happens when forecasting tools become more widely accessible, especially to smallholder farmers who’ve historically been at the very end of the information chain. Moving from quarterly reports to daily signals doesn’t just improve efficiency; it shifts power.

And that’s really the thread running through this episode: climate change isn’t just an environmental problem. It’s a problem of information, incentives and who gets to decide what happens next.

So if you’re tired of climate conversations that stay theoretical, this one stays grounded — in food, money, risk and the systems we rely on far more than we realise.

Reading materials:

• Climate extremes, food price spikes, and their wider societal risks

• ECB: The impact of global warming on inflation: averages, seasonality and extremes

• Harnessing artificial intelligence for food security in a changing climate

• Impact of climate change on the UK food system

• Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security This is part of the UK government’s unpublished report from October 2025 on the potential national security implications of nature and biodiversity loss. Not the full report but its critical to understand how the different aspects of climate change and nature loss affect far more than environmental systems.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram – and why not spread the word with your friends and colleagues?