This project will investigate how climate change affects the nutritional status of women and children in low- and middle-income countries. We will link data on the nutritional status of 1.7 million women and 850 thousand children from 50 countries to high-resolution climate anomalies measured during critical developmental periods of exposure. We will then use these data to measure climatic effects on underweight and stunting while accounting for socio-demographic characteristics as well as potential spatial and temporal confounders. Subsequently we will extend this analysis to examine the heterogeneity of climate effects across potential social and contextual axes of vulnerability. These analyses will be buttressed by a series of robustness checks that account for nonlinearity, age misreporting, selective mortality and measurement error in climate. This research will represent the first rigorous global analysis of the consequences of climate change for the nutritional status of vulnerable populations, and will directly feed into the ongoing global conversation about how best to mitigate the costs of climate change.
Climate change is expected to have large negative consequences for the food security and health of vulnerable populations in low and middle-income countries, but to date the relationships have not been well described. We will use large-sample data on the height and weight of women and children from low- and middle-income countries across the globe to examine how climate variability affects nutritional status, and how these relationships vary across potentially vulnerable groups.
