When Rainfall Meets Hunger: Towards an Early-Action System for Acute Undernutrition in Guatemala
Abstract
According to the World Food Programme (WFP, April 2020), the prevalence in Guatemala of stunting in children under the age of 5 reaches 46.5% nationally, and it climbs up to 70% in some departments, with peaks as high as 90% in the hardest hit municipalities. Food insecurity in Guatemala is driven by both climate and non-climate factors, and its pathways are often complex (Beveridge et al, 2019) . Nonetheless, since 70% of the impoverished population in Guatemala lives in rural areas, where agricultural production is mainly rain-fed and is the main livelihood activity and source of food (Lopez-Ridaura et al, 2019), climate factors tend to have a significant weight to explain acute undernutrition in children under 5, especially in the Dry Corridor, a region already highly vulnerable to climate-related impacts. This paper studies the role of climate and non-climate factors in the Guatemalan hunger seasonality, analyzed with the help of a hierarchy of statistical models of increasing complexity. Overall, observed total rainfall (or lack thereof) can be used as a predictor of acute undernutrition in children under 5, with lags ranging from 3-6 months depending on the geographical location. The best statistical models developed exhibit good forecast discrimination (as measured by the two-alternative forced-choice metric, 2AFC; see Mason and Weigel, 2009) for almost all departments in Guatemala, the forecast skill being higher over the Dry Corridor. Although the interannual and seasonal characteristics (i.e., timing) of acute malnutrition are well captured by models using rainfall as the only predictor, the inclusion of non-climate information, like the price of the basic food basket, tends to increase the forecast accuracy in terms of the number of acute undernutrition cases. This objective system is being co-developed and implemented in Guatemala by local experts from different Guatemalan and international institutions, including the National Secretariat for Food Security and Nutrition, via the Columbia University World Project "Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow" (ACToday).
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMGC0510012G
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0230 Impacts of climate change: human health;
- GEOHEALTH;
- 0231 Impacts of climate change: agricultural health;
- GEOHEALTH;
- 1699 General or miscellaneous;
- GLOBAL CHANGE