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.

人们普遍预计，气候变化将对粮食安全和饮食多样性造成负面影响。饮食多样性对于儿童尤其重要，因为它与对儿童发育至关重要的大量和微量营养素摄入相关。尽管有这些预期的联系，但很少有经验证据证明饮食多样性与气候变化之间存在关联，尤其是跨多个全球区域的大型数据集以及最新的气候数据。在这里，我们使用来自19个国家和超过107 000名儿童的调查数据，以及30年的降水和温度数据，来探索气候与儿童饮食多样性之间的关系，同时控制其他农业生态，地理和社会经济因素。我们发现，较高的长期温度与总体儿童饮食多样性的减少有关，而与长期平均降雨量相比，上一年的较高降雨与饮食的多样性有关。单独检查六个地区（亚洲，中美洲，北非，南美，东南非洲和西非），我们发现五个地区的饮食多样性与高温相关而显着减少，而三个地区的饮食多样性与降水较高相关而显着增加。 。在西非，降雨增加似乎抵消了温度升高对饮食多样性的影响。在某些地区，气候对饮食多样性的统计影响与其他共同发展努力（包括那些致力于教育，改善水和厕所，减少贫困。这些结果表明，气温升高和降雨变化性可能对儿童饮食多样性产生深远的长期和长期影响，从而有可能破坏旨在改善粮食安全的广泛发展干预措施。