Systematic review of current efforts to quantify the impacts of climate change on undernutrition

The World Health Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change propose undernutrition as the most significant impact of climate change on child health. The question then arises: Where does the empirical evidence to back this claim come from? Current evidence for the impacts of clim...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Phalkey, Revati K., Aranda-Jan, Clara, Marx, Sabrina, Höfle, Bernhard, Sauerborn, Rainer
Format: Article
Published: National Academy of Sciences 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/36152/
Description
Summary:The World Health Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change propose undernutrition as the most significant impact of climate change on child health. The question then arises: Where does the empirical evidence to back this claim come from? Current evidence for the impacts of climate on childhood undernutrition draws on a limited number of heterogeneous studies with methodological limitations and is based predominantly on secondary data. Establishing and validating causal pathways among complex confounding factors remain the main challenge in quantifying the climate-attributable fraction of undernutrition. Systematically generating evidence from long-term, high-quality primary data on a range of factors (agricultural, environmental, socioeconomic, and health) at the household level is critical for designing adaptation strategies, particularly for subsistence farmers.