Nearly 6 million children are driven into severe hunger by the hot, dry shifts of a strong el Niño

 

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/931018

 

 News Release 12-Oct-2021
Peer-Reviewed Publication
University of Chicago

 

Over the last year and a half, the 1-in-100-year Covid-19 pandemic drove millions of children into hunger. But every four to seven years, an El Niño causes weather patterns to shift across the tropics, leading to warmer temperatures and precipitation changes and widespread impacts on agriculture, infectious diseases, conflicts and more. During a single bad El Niño, nearly 6 million children are driven into undernutrition as a result, according to a study in Nature Communications. That’s at least 70 percent and perhaps up to three times the number of children who have gone hungry because of the pandemic.

“It would have been very difficult to prepare the world for a pandemic that few saw coming, but we can’t say the same about El Niño events that have a potentially much greater impact on the long-term growth and health of children,” says Amir Jina, an author of the paper and assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy. “Scientists can forecast an approaching El Niño up to 6 months in advance, allowing the international community to intervene to prevent the worst impacts. Our study helps to quantify those impacts on child nutrition to guide global public investments in food insecure areas.”

-----

 While it is unclear whether climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of El Niño, climate change will cause hot areas to become hotter and dry areas to become drier. When El Niño is layered on top of these overall shifts, there is no doubt that the impacts during El Niño years will be worse than they are now.  For example, as areas expect to lose crops with climate change, those same areas will likely lose even more crops during El Niño years.

-----