University of California Geographers Marta Jankowska (UCSB/SDSU), David Lopez-Carr (UCSB), Chris Funk (UCSB), Greg Husak (UCSB), and Zoë Chafe (UCB Energy and Resources Group) have recently coauthored an article in Applied Geography (DOI: 10.1016/j.apgeog.2011.08.009) titled “Climate change and human health: Spatial modeling of water availability, malnutrition, and livelihoods in Mali, Africa.” The article focuses on the way climate change impacts child malnutrition in Mali, and lead authors Lopez-Carr and Jankowska were subsequently interviewed by Monica Contestabile for a “Beyond Boundaries” article about their project in Nature Climate Change.
According to the abstract of the article, “This study develops a novel approach for projecting climate trends in the Sahel in relation to shifting livelihood zones and health outcomes. Focusing on Mali, we explore baseline relationships between temperature, precipitation, livelihood, and malnutrition in 407 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) clusters with a total of 14,238 children, resulting in a thorough spatial analysis of coupled climate-health dynamics. Results suggest links between livelihoods and each measure of malnutrition, as well as a link between climate and stunting. A ‘front-line’ of vulnerability, related to the transition between agricultural and pastoral livelihoods, is identified as an area where mitigation efforts might be usefully targeted. Additionally, climate is projected to 2025 for the Sahel, and demographic trends are introduced to explore how the intersection of climate and demographics may shift the vulnerability ‘front-line’, potentially exposing an additional 6 million people in Mali, up to a million of them children, to heightened risk of malnutrition from climate and livelihood changes.
Results indicate that, holding constant morbidity levels, approximately one quarter of a million children will suffer stunting, nearly two hundred thousand will be malnourished, and over one hundred thousand will become anemic in this expanding arid zone by 2025. Climate and health research conducted at finer spatial scales and within shorter projected time lines can identify vulnerability hot spots that are of the highest priority for adaptation interventions; such an analysis can also identify areas with similar characteristics that may be at heightened risk. Such meso-scale coupled human-environment research may facilitate appropriate policy interventions strategically located beyond today’s vulnerability front-line.”
During the Nature Climate Change interview, Jankowska and Lopez-Carr were asked about the impetus for this project and the main objective of the work at the beginning of the project. In reply, the authors stated that “the aim of the project was to examine potential climate drivers of child health and mortality in Africa. Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are widely used in research in public health, but rarely has there been integration with physical science projects. We decided to focus on child malnutrition because it is a complex problem, and climate change can influence malnutrition in complex ways. It can be chronic — a long-lasting condition reflected by child stunting — or short-term, when a sudden shock, such as a food-price increase, results in children being underweight or anemic.”
The authors also emphasized the interdisciplinary nature of their research. “We proposed linking the DHS dataset with climate data to our climate science colleagues. As a result, a new collaboration between the Human-Environment Dynamics Lab and the Climate Hazards Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara was set up. An additional source of collaborators was the Joint Doctoral Program in Geography between San Diego State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Finally, the National Academy of Sciences facilitated two of us meeting through the International Institute of Applied System Analysis in Vienna.”
The authors went on to point out that “We succeeded in this project because we started small and focused on one country. Now that we have worked together and we have produced valuable results, we can move forward to expand the research. Finally, we believe it is important to value the role of young researchers as a source of enthusiasm and fresh ideas that connect various disciplines, and for their ability to quickly build bridges for collaborations…For something as complex as climate change and health, there is no way that researchers from one field of knowledge can know everything. Interdisciplinary research will become the main mode of doing research. Bringing together people who have overlapping but distinct skills and knowledge are one of the strongest tools for anticipating, measuring and responding to climatic change and its related effects.”
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