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.

In this scenario, cheaper, longer-lasting products with low nutritional value are gaining ground, increasing the risk of two conditions that, at first glance, may seem contradictory: childhood obesity and malnutrition.

The Interactive Panel on Global Syndemic in Children Under 5 seeks to highlight these relationships. The dashboard is part of the project Global Syndemic: The Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change on the Health and Nutrition of Children Under Five Served by the Unified Health System (SUS). It presents Brazilian municipal-level data on nutritional issues and greenhouse gas emissions.

The dashboard aims not only to show where malnutrition and overweight are concentrated in the country but also to help users understand how these conditions are distributed and how they relate to environmental factors. Users can set severity alerts when more than one health issue is present in the same municipality or when conditions show a worsening trend over the years.

The tool was developed by Sustentarea, a research group that brings together Brazilian researchers, students and professionals from different fields to study and develop creative interventions related to food systems, sustainable nutrition and the global syndemic. The research and outreach group is based at the School of Public Health of the University of São Paulo (FSP-USP).

The starting point for understanding this issue is that obesity, malnutrition and climate change are not isolated problems. In 2019, an international commission writing in the scientific journal The Lancet brought these three crises together under the concept of global syndemic.

The concept of syndemic

The term “syndemic” describes the simultaneous occurrence of two or more epidemics that interact, exacerbate each other’s effects and share common social causes. In the case of the global syndemic, obesity, malnutrition and climate change coexist and are driven by similar structural factors. These include social inequality, limited access to healthy foods and sustainable food production systems. Transportation and changes in land use also contribute, with impacts on human health and the environment.

At the heart of these dynamics are food systems, which encompass the people and organizations involved in food production, processing, distribution, marketing and consumption, as well as the interactions among them and external influences such as environmental, economic, political, technological and cultural factors.

These systems are associated with approximately 74% of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, they determine which foods reach different regions, how much they cost and who can afford them—a situation that can contribute to both malnutrition and overweight.

The panel focuses on children under 5, who are in a phase of high biological and social vulnerability. In the early years, diet and environmental conditions influence growth, development, immunity and health throughout life.

The effects of the climate crisis and malnutrition are not distributed equally: young children and low-income families tend to suffer more severe impacts and have fewer resources to adapt.

The tool compiles data for Brazilian municipalities from 2008 to 2019 and allows users to track trends in stunting and overweight alongside per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than addressing each problem separately, it seeks to identify where they overlap and which areas should be prioritized in health, food and climate policies.

How the dashboard identifies priorities

To identify the most vulnerable municipalities, the dashboard combines data on stunting and overweight from the Brazilian Ministry of Health’s Food and Nutrition Surveillance System (Sisvan) with municipal estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from SEEG Brasil.

The analysis considers both the situation recorded in 2019 and the trends in these indicators from 2008 to 2019. The years 2020–2022 were excluded because they represent an atypical period. During the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for medical care fell, significantly distorting the trends used in the analysis and compromising the reliability of the data for that period.

Each municipality receives a rating ranging from “very good” to “very poor” for each of the syndemic’s three components, based on whether the indicator increased or decreased and its level in the last year analyzed. The nutritional criteria follow guidelines from UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the World Bank, while the emissions limits were defined based on climate targets set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The results are then combined. The panel also identifies areas with a double burden of malnutrition—where undernutrition and overweight coexist—and those where nutritional problems are associated with high emissions. The remaining categories indicate specific alerts for climate, undernutrition or overweight, as well as more favorable situations.

This does not mean, however, that a municipality’s emissions directly cause the nutritional problems observed there. The maps serve primarily to identify geographic patterns, guide new research and help policymakers direct health, food and climate policies.

Four profiles of food systems

There is no single Brazilian food system. Conditions related to production, access, consumption and environmental impact vary according to the economic, social and geographic characteristics of each region.

To represent this diversity, the researchers used the Brazilian Multidimensional Index of Sustainable Food Systems (MISFS-R). The index comprises 46 indicators organized into four dimensions—social, nutritional, environmental and economic—and allows for a comparison of the performance of the states and their capitals. By grouping places with similar characteristics, the researchers identified four major food system profiles in Brazil:

1) Agricultural Belt—comprising the Brazilian states of Acre, Rondônia, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Goiás and Tocantins. It is characterized by strong agricultural and livestock production and indicators of sound economic development, but also by high environmental pressure associated with extensive livestock farming and deforestation.

2) Central Economic Hub—comprising Brazilian states in the South and Southeast regions. It shows the best overall performance on the index. Nevertheless, it faces challenges such as gender and racial inequalities in rural areas and high pesticide use.

3) Latent Development Axis—corresponding to the Brazilian states of the Northeast region. It has the most unfavorable results in terms of income, food productivity and nutrition indicators.

4) Vulnerability Frontier—comprising the Brazilian states of Pará, Amazonas, Roraima and Amapá. This area is marked by a higher prevalence of food insecurity, lower dietary diversity and difficulties in accessing food.

These four profiles help put the panel’s data in context. In one region, food-related problems may be linked to low income and limited access. In another, they may stem from the expansion of food environments dominated by ultra-processed products or from the environmental consequences of an intensive production model.

The panel’s analysis reinforces that protecting children’s health requires action beyond the health sector. Ensuring adequate nutrition in early childhood depends on policies related to income, food security, sustainable food production, food supply, school meal programs, environmental protection and adaptation to climate change.

By linking climate, nutrition and children’s health, the panel shows that addressing malnutrition and obesity also means addressing the social and environmental conditions that cause them.

Who’s behind this story?

Swati Mestri

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space.

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Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.