Understanding the IPC Scales

Understand the IPC Scales

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) provides a common scale for classifying the severity and magnitude of food insecurity and acute malnutrition, which improves the rigour, transparency, relevance and comparability of food security and nutrition analysis for decision-makers.
IPC analyses seek to answer six questions:

1. How severe is the situation?

2. When will populations be affected?

3. Where are the most affected people located?

4. How many people are affected?

5. Why is it happening?

6. Who are those most affected?

To answer these questions, the IPC uses three scales: the Acute Food Insecurity scale, the Chronic Food Insecurity scale and the Acute Malnutrition scale.
The IPC distinguishes between acute food insecurity, chronic food insecurity and acute malnutrition, since different interventions are needed to address each situation, providing decision-makers with invaluable information to address food insecurity and malnutrition.