In their editorial “Poverty and famines 2.0: the opportunities and challenges of crisis modeling and forecasting” in the Journal of Public Health Policy, Paul Howe and Elena Naumova explore how the convergence of three trends – new conceptual developments in our understanding of famines, technological advances in modeling, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics, and recent progress in humanitarian practice – presents a unique opportunity to better model and forecast these crises. They identify several potential risks and propose six principles that could help guide future efforts in this emerging field.