The race to feed a warming world

Today, the world faces more challenges than at any time in my adult life: inflation, debt, new wars. Unfortunately, aid is not keeping pace with these needs, especially where it is needed most.

For example, more than half of all child deaths still occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2010, the proportion of the world's poor living in this region has increased by more than 20 percentage points. Yet over the same period, the share of total foreign aid to Africa has fallen from nearly 40 percent to just 25 percent – the lowest percentage in 20 years. Fewer resources mean more children will die from preventable causes.

The global health boom is over. But how long?

I have been wrestling with this question for five years: Will we look back on this period as the end of a golden era? Or is it just a brief pause before a new global health boom begins?

I am still an optimist. I believe we can give global health a second act – even in a world where competing challenges are forcing governments to expand their budgets.

To do this, we need a two-pronged approach. First, the world must recommit to the work that drove progress in the early 2000s, especially investing in essential vaccines and medicines. They are still saving millions of lives every year and we cannot afford to go backwards.

But we must also look forward. The research and development pipeline is full of powerful – and surprisingly cost-effective – new breakthroughs. Now we just need to use them to tackle the world's biggest health crises. And that starts with good nutrition.

Every now and then I'm asked what I would do if I had a magic wand. For years I've given the same answer: I would solve the problem of malnutrition.

This summer, UNICEF released its first report on child nutrition poverty. The results were horrifying. Two-thirds of children worldwide – more than 400 million children – do not receive enough nutrients to grow and thrive, putting them at higher risk of malnutrition. In 2023, the WHO estimated that 148 million children would be stunted and 45 million would be wasted – the most serious forms of chronic and acute malnutrition. They cannot reach their full potential – and in the worst cases, cannot grow to adulthood. at all.

When a child dies, malnutrition is the underlying cause in half of the cases.

And now there is a significant headwind that is making solving the problem of malnutrition even more difficult: climate change. We worked with our partners at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to better understand just how difficult these headwinds are:

Due to climate change, an additional 40 million children will suffer from stunting and 28 million children will suffer from stunting between 2024 and 2050.

This is an important forecast that should help world leaders decide where to focus their aid funds to reverse current trends and the growing burden of malnutrition.

Of course, fighting climate change is crucial. But these data show that the health crisis and the climate crisis are the same in the poorest countries near the equator. In fact, the best way to fight the effects of climate change is to invest in nutrition.