Climate impacts associated with reduced diet diversity in children across nineteen countries

Abstract

It is widely anticipated that climate change will negatively affect both food security and diet diversity. Diet diversity is especially critical for children as it correlates with macro and micronutrient intake important for child development. Despite these anticipated links, little empirical evidence has demonstrated a relationship between diet diversity and climate change, especially across large datasets spanning multiple global regions and with more recent climate data. Here we use survey data from 19 countries and more than 107 000 children, coupled with 30 years of precipitation and temperature data, to explore the relationship of climate to child diet diversity while controlling for other agroecological, geographic, and socioeconomic factors. We find that higher long-term temperatures are associated with decreases in overall child diet diversity, while higher rainfall in the previous year, compared to the long-term average rainfall, is associated with greater diet diversity. Examining six regions (Asia, Central America, North Africa, South America, Southeast Africa, and West Africa) individually, we find that five have significant reductions in diet diversity associated with higher temperatures while three have significant increases in diet diversity associated with higher precipitation. In West Africa, increasing rainfall appears to counterbalance the effect of rising temperature impacts on diet diversity. In some regions, the statistical effect of climate on diet diversity is comparable to, or greater than, other common development efforts including those focused on education, improved water and toilets, and poverty reduction. These results suggest that warming temperatures and increasing rainfall variability could have profound short- and long-term impacts on child diet diversity, potentially undermining widespread development interventions aimed at improving food security.

The Impact of Rainfall Variability on Diets and Undernutrition of Young Children in Rural Burkina Faso

“…None applied a climate or rainfall variability pattern as proposed here. Additionally, we only found a single publication that explicitly addressed the link between climate variability and diets, but excluded child undernutrition ( 77 ). Here, the authors associated rainfall variability in the previous year to child dietary diversity in a multi-country analysis.…”

Building climate-sensitive nutrition programmes

“…Recent research found that a warm temperature anomaly in the previous year was associated with lower dietary diversity in the current year among children in several regions. 46 This finding suggests that seasonal forecasts could potentially be used to guide nutrition interventions. However, further research is needed to characterize the timing and nature of the temperature anomalies and to identify pathways through which dietary diversity is affected.…”

Stronger efforts are needed to safeguard the nutrition of school aged children

“…3 Because of the negative effects of climate change on food security, undernutrition, including micronutrient deficiency, is identified as one of the biggest threats to child health, especially for children in resource poor settings. 4 However, most of the focus on child health has been on the first five years of life, evidenced in the significant investment and progress in the health and nutrition of infants and young children over the past five decades. 5 Given the potential impact of climate change on child health and nutrition, and to safeguard the investment in infants and pre-school children, existing efforts must continue, but increased attention must be given to protecting and promoting school aged children's nutrition so they can develop and grow into healthy adults.…”

“…It is estimated that currently one billion children live in countries at extreme risk from the effects of climate change 3. Because of the negative effects of climate change on food security, undernutrition, including micronutrient deficiency, is identified as one of the biggest threats to child health, especially for children in resource poor settings 4. However, most of the focus on child health has been on the first five years of life, evidenced in the significant investment and progress in the health and nutrition of infants and young children over the past five decades 5.…”