Devex Opinion Piece Highlights Impacts of the Climate Crisis on Nutrition
Chief Program Officer Shawn Baker and Transforming Lives Through Nutrition Program Director Philomena Orji recently published an opinion piece on Devex about the most relentless consequence of climate change – malnutrition – and what the international community can do to address it.
The climate crisis is driving a nutrition crisis as increasingly extreme weather creates crop shortages and drives up the price of food, while policies and funding have not kept pace with the growing need. Shawn and Philomena argue that high-level academic and political discussions about climate change are often disconnected from the experiences of people living through the impacts.
This includes people like Farida Shagari, a 25-year-old mother of five in Adamawa State, Nigeria, an area that has experienced severe flooding this year. The difficult living conditions have taken a toll on her family’s health and the daily challenge of feeding her family is fraught with uncertainty. Along with the immediate concern of having enough food to eat, not getting adequate nutrition in childhood can have serious long-term consequences for her children’s health and development.
“Children, who are particularly vulnerable and have not contributed to the causes of climate change, are having their lives and futures imperiled by malnutrition,” Shawn and Philomena write.
This is the harsh reality of climate change for too many families around the world. After decades of progress, the climate crisis is threatening to erase hard-earned nutrition gains. Although the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently named malnutrition as the world’s worst child health crisis, climate funding for children’s nutrition makes up only 2.4% of key multilateral climate fund investments. Shawn and Philomena advocate for urgent funding to scale proven solutions to address malnutrition in rapidly changing climate.
Helen Keller Intl is partnering with communities grappling with the impacts of climate change to help ensure families can access nutritious foods and live-saving nutrition services. We are working to provide multiple micronutrients supplements for pregnant women to support the health of mothers and babies, fortify commonly used foods with essential nutrients to prevent malnutrition, increase screening and treatment for wasting to protect the health of children; and train and provide resources to support climate-adaptive agriculture so families can grow and sell their own healthy foods.
“It is more urgent than ever to fund these solutions and deliver them at scale,” write Shawn and Philomena. “This is how we build the resilience communities need to survive, thrive, and transform their lives in the face of growing climate challenges. Our planet is changing—our children and their families cannot wait.”
Read the full article on Devex.
