Climate crisis is affecting children's nutrition
Wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events are no longer the only ways climate change affects children around the world. Increasingly, it also affects their diets. Droughts reduce agricultural production, floods cut off roads and disrupt supply chains, and rising prices limit families' access to fruits, vegetables and other fresh foods.
Climate change is not just causing extreme weather, but also altering children's diets worldwide. Droughts, floods and higher food prices are limiting access to fresh fruits and vegetables, leading to a rise in cheap, unhealthy alternatives. This has created a paradoxical situation where both childhood obesity and malnutrition are on the rise.
The Interactive Panel on Global Syndemic in Children Under 5 aims to shed light on these complex relationships. This dashboard, part of the Global Syndemic project, uses Brazilian municipal data to show where malnutrition and obesity are concentrated and how they are linked to environmental factors. Users can set alerts for multiple health issues in a municipality or trends in worsening conditions.
The tool, developed by Sustentarea, a research group at the University of São Paulo, highlights the interconnectedness of obesity, malnutrition and climate change - not as isolated issues but as a global syndemic driven by factors like social inequality and unhealthy food systems. The dashboard compiles data from 2008 to 2019 and tracks trends in stunting and overweight alongside emissions.
It identifies areas with a double burden of malnutrition, where undernutrition and obesity coexist, and those where nutritional problems are tied to high emissions. While the maps don't show direct causation, they help pinpoint geographic patterns to guide policies for health, food and climate. Children, especially those from low-income families, are most vulnerable, with their early years impacting lifelong health.
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