Increasing heat can boost malnutrition among children
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“Since the 1980s, Brazil has strived to reduce child malnutrition. Now, the country is being affected by climate change, and this could help reverse the progress we’ve made,” says nutrition researcher Priscila Ribas of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation’s Center for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health in Salvador, Brazil.
Ribas and colleagues looked at data from 2007 to 2018 on children between 1 and 5 years old who underwent routine height and weight measurements required to receive support from social programs. “We looked at a wider group which is already underprivileged, since they rely on federal aid. Still, the most vulnerable within this group were the most affected,” she says.
Indigenous children and those from Brazil’s North and Northeast regions (the country’s poorest) were the hardest hit, as were those in rural and poor urban areas. For example, 1 in 4 Indigenous children were stunted, meaning they were unusually short for their age — a rate more than twice that of other races and ethnicities.
Over the 10-year study period, the team linked children’s measurements to birth records for demographic details and to daily temperature data from all over Brazil. For each child, the researchers then computed the average local temperature in the 12 months prior to the last recorded measurement.
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