Modeling Climate and Conflict Shocks on Acute Malnutrition in Children

Undernutrition, which affects one in five children globally, is a significant threat to the health of children and contributes to nearly half of all deaths during childhood. Wasting, which refers to low weight for height, gauged based on international standards, is one specific measure of undernutrition. Children who experience wasting frequently become stunted over time, whose effects are potentially irreversible. Despite progress in strengthening early warning systems for food insecurity, current approaches to detect wasting in children under five still tend to be 'late' warning systems, which are only able to detect a nutrition crisis after it has already begun. A shift to preventative actions that may intervene to prevent long-term health damage to children will require a change in the way we conceptualize nutrition security, forecast nutrition-related vulnerabilities at a relatively local level, identify the causal factors driving nutritional deterioration, and design nutrition-sensitive services that mitigate the impact of shocks on households and communities. Our objective is to incorporate short-term temporal shocks from climate derived from remote sensing and conflict from online databases into understanding the risk of acute childhood malnutrition in vulnerable communities. This paper presents results from a review of the literature, examining over 700 papers, and ultimately focusing on 77 papers with primary data and modeling results that set out factors associated with wasting in the literature that could be used as 'early' indicators of risk. We found that few papers look at the impact of both climate and conflict shocks on children, with even fewer studying the impact of these shocks over multiple geographies. Climate shocks, measured with vegetation and rainfall data, and food price shocks are among the most robust risk factors for wasting. Conflict is a robust predictor of stunting, but few studies examined the impact of conflict on wasting. We found that although a large array of factors have been evaluated as important for wasting, many of the findings have yet to be validated in multiple studies. Improved understanding of the factors that ameliorate the impact of shocks on acute malnutrition could enable an effective response to nutritional risk.