Climate variability and child nutrition: Findings from sub-Saharan Africa
Introduction
Changing temperature and precipitation patterns associated with climate change are expected to disrupt food systems across the world through impacts on agricultural production, as well as on the health and socioeconomic status of agricultural laborers and consumers (Bosello et al., 2006, Dell et al., 2012, McMichael et al., 2006, Myers et al., 2014, Nelson et al., 2014). Such impacts have clear implications for food security, as they will affect the availability of food and households’ ability to access and fully utilize food for adequate nutrition (Barrett, 2010, Wheeler and Von Braun, 2013). One relatively understudied implication is that climatic variability and its second-order effects are likely to affect levels and patterns of malnutrition (Phalkey et al., 2015). These impacts are anticipated to be concentrated among children, who are especially vulnerable to food and nutritional insecurity. Malnutrition may increase children’s risk of other morbidities and mortality (Pelletier et al., 1995), and malnutrition during early childhood can permanently diminish individuals’ health and socioeconomic attainment over the life course (Alderman et al., 2006, Currie and Vogl, 2013, Maccini and Yang, 2009, Van den Berg et al., 2009). Unmitigated exposure to climate variability among children may have residual health and social costs decades into the future.
We contribute to the emerging climate-nutrition literature by analyzing the respective effects of temperature and precipitation anomalies on child weight-for-height (WHZ) and wasting (WHZ < -2) across a sample from 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), combined with historical climate records from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit Time Series (Boyle et al., 2018, Harris et al., 2014), we estimate a series of multivariate regression models to address two overarching objectives. First, we estimate the association between recent exposure to climatic variability and children’s weight, measured both continuously and as a binary indicator of low weight (i.e., wasting). Second, we test for systematic variation in these effects across socioeconomic groups that we expect to be differentially vulnerable to changing environmental conditions. We focus this second set of analyses on wasting since the health and social costs of such acute malnutrition are high. Our analyses reveal that exposure to high temperatures is associated with reductions in WHZ and corresponding increases in the prevalence of wasting. The overall direction of temperature effects on wasting are remarkably similar across multiple sub-populations of interest, with only modest differences between rural and urban populations. Precipitation deficits are associated with reduced WHZ, but these changes do not translate into increased wasting risk. Together, our findings underline the need to develop evidence-based interventions to protect children from the health effects of environmental change.
Section snippets
Climatic variability and nutritional security
Changes in temperatures, precipitation, and the second-order effects of such environmental changes are expected to affect child malnutrition through multiple pathways. All three of the major determinants of food and nutritional security—availability, access, and utilization—are plausibly affected by climatic variability. Climate impacts on the production, and thus availability, of food have been posited to be particularly important and have received the most attention to date (Grace et al., 2012
Data
We analyze child anthropometric and socioeconomic data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), which we access using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series database (IPUMS-DHS) (Boyle et al., 2018). The DHS program has implemented over 400 nationally-representative household surveys across nearly 100 low- and middle-income countries since the 1980s (DHS Program 2019). DHS data have been used extensively in demographic and public health research on sub-Saharan Africa (Eissler et al.,
Overall estimates
We begin by estimating the average effects of climatic variability on children’s weight and wasting status across our target population. Given the possibility that the most significant impacts will occur at the extremes of the temperature and precipitation distributions, we conduct a series of preliminary analyses to test for non-linearities in, and interactions between, temperature and precipitation. We estimate models that include only linear temperature and precipitation terms (Model S1 and
Discussion and conclusion
Our analysis of the links between climatic variability and child weight in 18 African countries suggests that concerns about the nutritional impacts of climate change are well founded. Over the past three decades, temperature and precipitation variability has had substantively important effects on young children’s nutritional status, as indicated by WHZ measurements and the probability of wasting. The first objective of this study was to estimate the overall association between climatic
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Brian C. Thiede: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Project administration. Johann Strube: Software, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) in Chicago, IL. The authors thank Mark Montgomery for his constructive feedback as a discussant for the PAA session in which the initial version of this paper was presented. The authors acknowledge Matthew Hancock’s helpful editorial assistance and Yosef Bodovski’s programming assistance. Thiede also acknowledges assistance provided by the Population Research Institute at the
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