Nearly 6 million children are driven into severe hunger by the hot, dry
shifts of a strong el Nin~o

Date:
October 12, 2021
Source:
University of Chicago
Summary:
Up to three times more children suffer severe hunger with each El
Nin~o than from COVID-19. El Nin~o events provide a snapshot of
the future under climate change and chronicle the lack of proactive
policy action even when climate events are predictable.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
Over the last year and a half, the 1-in-100-year Covid-19 pandemic drove millions of children into hunger. But every four to seven years, an El
Nin~o causes weather patterns to shift across the tropics, leading to
warmer temperatures and precipitation changes and widespread impacts on agriculture, infectious diseases, conflicts and more. During a single
bad El Nin~o, nearly 6 million children are driven into undernutrition
as a result, according to a study in Nature Communications. That's at
least 70 percent and perhaps up to three times the number of children
who have gone hungry because of the pandemic.


==========================================================================
"It would have been very difficult to prepare the world for a pandemic
that few saw coming, but we can't say the same about El Nin~o events
that have a potentially much greater impact on the long-term growth
and health of children," says Amir Jina, an author of the paper and
assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy. "Scientists
can forecast an approaching El Nin~o up to 6 months in advance, allowing
the international community to intervene to prevent the worst impacts. Our study helps to quantify those impacts on child nutrition to guide global
public investments in food insecure areas." Jina and his coauthors, Jesse Anttila-Hughes and Gordon McCord, provide the first estimate of El Nin~o's impacts on child nutrition throughout the global tropics. They do so by assembling data on more than a million children spanning four decades
and all developing country regions, a dataset that represents about half
of the more than 600 million-strong under-five population globally.

Their analysis finds that warmer, drier El Nin~o conditions increase undernutrition in children across most of the tropics, where 20 percent
of children are already deemed severely underweight by the World Health Organization (WHO). That percentage ticks up by 2.9 percent during El
Nin~o years, affecting millions of children.

In the case of the severe 2015 El Nin~o, the number of children at
or below the WHO threshold for severely underweight jumped by nearly
6 percent -- or an additional nearly 6 million children driven into
hunger. While the children's weight appears to recuperate with time,
the shock on their nutrition at such a young age stunts their growth in
later years.

As part of the Sustainable Development Goals, the international
community is working to eliminate all forms of undernutrition by 2030,
meaning each year about 6 million children would need to rise out of
severe hunger. With less than 10 years remaining to meet that goal,
the 2015 El Nin~o erased one year of progress. To offset the impacts
of the 2015 El Nin~o would require providing 134 million children with micronutrient supplements or 72 million food insecure children with food,
the study finds.

"Since scientists can point to which places are going to have drought and
which places are going to flood months ahead of time, the international community could act proactively to prevent millions of children from
falling into undernutrition," says Gordon McCord from the UC San Diego
School of Global Policy and Strategy. "It's a real tragedy that even in
the 21st century so much of the human population is pushed to desperation
by predictable climate processes." While it is unclear whether climate
change will increase the frequency and intensity of El Nin~o, climate
change will cause hot areas to become hotter and dry areas to become
drier. When El Nin~o is layered on top of these overall shifts, there is
no doubt that the impacts during El Nin~o years will be worse than they
are now. For example, as areas expect to lose crops with climate change,
those same areas will likely lose even more crops during El Nin~o years.

"These are routine events in the climate that lead to real tragedy
around the world," says Jesse Anttila-Hughes from the University of
San Francisco.

"Studying El Nin~o can teach us about the impacts that come from a hotter, drier climate -- important lessons as these changes become more global
in scale with climate change. But the fact that we live through an El
Nin~o every few years, we know they're coming, and we still don't act is
a bad sign since many of these climate shifts -- from isolated heat waves
to hurricanes -- will be a lot less predictable as the climate changes." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Chicago. Note: Content
may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Jesse K. Anttila-Hughes, Amir S. Jina, Gordon C. McCord. ENSO
impacts
child undernutrition in the global tropics. Nature Communications,
Oct.

12, 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26048-7 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211012112227.htm

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