Climate change link to malnutrition

Every minute, seven children starve to death because of a lack of treatment but climate change on could make this figure soar, the UN conference on climate change heard. Food insecurity, health threats and lack of water, the major forces fuelling malnutrition, will all worsen with climate change, the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN) told delegates.Promoting and protecting nutrition should be a key part of adapting to climate change, the committee argued. It called on nations to collaborate “to ensure that political will, financial resources and human efforts are optimized”.

More than 19 million children face hunger-related death at any given moment but only three per cent of them will be given treatment, the committee said at the opening of the two-week conference. By 2020, food production could shrink by as much as 50 per cent in some African countries, and by 30 per cent in Central and South Asia, creating a very high risk of hunger, it said. The link between climate change and nutrition is not as straightforward as people in poor countries simply not getting enough food. Undernutrition is caused by lack of the right types of food and disease, which come from not getting enough food, poor maternal and child care practices, and poor access to clean drinking water, unsafe sanitation and ill health, the committee said. And all of these are directly affected by climate change, it added. "Malnutrition could potentially be the output of climate change’s impact on sectors such as health and water," said committee member, Andrew Mitchell, from the French aid agency, Action contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger).

By 2050, a fall in the amount of calories available could raise child malnutrition by 20 percent, a study by the US think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute  forecast in October 2009. "Climate change will eliminate much of the improvement in child malnourishment levels that would occur with no climate change," the study found. The people who wrote the report called for "aggressive" investment – from about £4billion a year – to boost calorie consumption enough to offset the negative impacts of climate change on the health and wellbeing of children. The food price crisis, in 2007 and 2008 followed by one of the worst global economic recessions in recent years, has revived the humanitarian aid world's interest in malnutrition. Recent estimates show that the two crises have pushed the number of hungry people in the world to more than a billion.