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. 2019 Aug 27;116(35):17219-17224.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1905228116. Epub 2019 Aug 12.

Mapping the effects of drought on child stunting

Matthew W Cooper  1   2   3 , Molly E Brown  1 , Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler  2 , Georg Pflug  2 , Ian McCallum  2 , Steffen Fritz  2 , Julie Silva  1 , Alexander Zvoleff  4
Affiliations

Mapping the effects of drought on child stunting

Matthew W Cooper et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

As climate change continues, it is expected to have increasingly adverse impacts on child nutrition outcomes, and these impacts will be moderated by a variety of governmental, economic, infrastructural, and environmental factors. To date, attempts to map the vulnerability of food systems to climate change and drought have focused on mapping these factors but have not incorporated observations of historic climate shocks and nutrition outcomes. We significantly improve on these approaches by using over 580,000 observations of children from 53 countries to examine how precipitation extremes since 1990 have affected nutrition outcomes. We show that precipitation extremes and drought in particular are associated with worse child nutrition. We further show that the effects of drought on child undernutrition are mitigated or amplified by a variety of factors that affect both the adaptive capacity and sensitivity of local food systems with respect to shocks. Finally, we estimate a model drawing on historical observations of drought, geographic conditions, and nutrition outcomes to make a global map of where child stunting would be expected to increase under drought based on current conditions. As climate change makes drought more commonplace and more severe, these results will aid policymakers by highlighting which areas are most vulnerable as well as which factors contribute the most to creating resilient food systems.

Keywords: child stunting; drought; undernutrition; vulnerability mapping.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
(A) Relationship between the 24-mo SPEI and residual HAZ scores. During periods of normal rainfall, children were typically taller than household and individual factors would otherwise predict (residual > 0). Conversely, during periods of minor to severe drought and during periods of severe wetness, children were typically shorter (residual < 0). This nonparametric analysis was used the discretize the 24-mo SPEI variable into drought and normal periods and to exclude extremely wet periods, based on the cutoffs at −0.4 and 1.4. (B) Histogram of child nutrition observations at various SPEI levels.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Coefficient estimates of geographic variables moderating the effects of drought on child HAZ scores. Positive coefficients mitigate the effects of drought, while negative coefficients exacerbate the effects of drought. Some variables were log-transformed, and then all variables were scaled from 0 to 1. Variables are color-coded according to whether they characterize a system’s sensitivity to shocks (green) or adaptive capacity (blue).
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Expected decrease in mean child HAZ scores during drought conditions.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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