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Climate change is already having a devastating impact on children’s health around the world and the situation is expected to worsen in the coming years unless urgent action is taken. The latest Goalkeepers Report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has warned that climate change could push an additional 40 million children to stunting and 28 million more to wasting between 2024 and 2050.
The report, titled A Race to Nourish a Warming World, was released September 17, 2024 and outlined the dire consequences of climate change on global child health. Rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and changes in rainfall patterns are all contributing to food insecurity, malnutrition, and disease.
The Goalkeepers Report is an annual paper published by the foundation that focuses on global development challenges and progress made towards achieving the United Nations-mandated Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
The 2024 report highlighted how rising temperatures, erratic rainfall patterns and more frequent extreme weather events are disrupting food production systems, particularly in vulnerable regions. These disruptions are exacerbating existing food insecurity and malnutrition, leading to a vicious cycle of poverty and poor health.
Climate change would, therefore, lead to a surge in stunting, where children failed to reach their full physical and mental potential and wasting, which caused emaciation and developmental delays. In 2023, 148 million children suffered from stunting and 45 million were affected by wasting, according to the World Health Organization. These numbers were expected to rise drastically unless global efforts to address malnutrition were scaled up.
Bill Gates, co-chair of the foundation, emphasised that global health funding had to be maintained and directed where it was most needed.
The world’s worst child health crisis is malnutrition. Climate change is making it even harder to solve
Bill Gates in 2024 Goalkeepers Report
Gates highlighted the urgency of supporting initiatives like the Child Nutrition Fund, which coordinated donor financing to improve child health and called on governments to fully fund established health institutions such as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The report also underscored the economic impact of malnutrition, with the World Bank estimating that undernutrition resulted in $3 trillion in productivity losses annually. In low-income countries, these losses ranged from 3 per cent to 16 per cent of gross domestic product, hindering long-term development.
The report called for a global effort to address the root causes of hunger, including poverty, inequality and climate change. Key recommendations include:
Investing in climate-smart agriculture: Supporting farmers in adopting practices that can improve yields while reducing their environmental impact.
Strengthening social protection systems: Providing safety nets to vulnerable populations, particularly those affected by climate-related disasters.
Improving nutrition: Ensuring that children have access to nutritious food and healthcare.
Accelerating progress on gender equality: Empowering women and girls, who play a crucial role in food production and nutrition.
The report highlighted innovative tools that were already making an impact, including new agricultural technologies that had the potential to prevent 109 million cases of child stunting by 2050 in countries like India, Kenya and Nigeria. Additionally, efforts to fortify basic food items such as salt and bouillon cubes with essential vitamins and minerals were helping reduce cases of anaemia and neural tube defects in countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria.
Prenatal vitamins and other micronutrient supplements were also identified as cost-effective interventions, with the potential to save half a million lives and improve outcomes for millions of babies by 2040. Recent research into the microbiome — highlighted in the report — suggested that better gut health could further revolutionise malnutrition treatment, offering hope for even more comprehensive solutions in the future.
The report has come at a time when foreign aid to Africa — home to more than half of all child deaths globally — had decreased to its lowest percentage in 20 years. Bill Gates emphasised the need for a “second act” in global health, calling for a renewed commitment to addressing child malnutrition and other pressing global health challenges.
“If we do these things, we won’t just save millions of lives — we’ll also prove that humanity can rise to meet its greatest challenges,” Gates concluded in the report.
The 2024 Goalkeepers report also included essays from experts and farmers on the front lines of the malnutrition crisis, demonstrating how these innovative solutions were already transforming lives in countries like India, Kenya and Nigeria.
The window for action was rapidly closing, as the impacts of climate change were already beginning to manifest in more frequent droughts, floods and extreme weather events that disproportionately affect low-income regions, it added. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, remained at the forefront of the crisis, with over half of all child deaths globally occurring in the region.
Without immediate intervention, millions more children would face irreversible damage to their health, trapping them in cycles of poverty, the report warned.
The unequal distribution of foreign aid as a critical challenge was also highlighted by the paper. Since 2010, the percentage of foreign aid going to Africa had decreased to 25 per cent from 40 per cent, despite the continent bearing the brunt of the global child health crisis. This reduction came at a time when inflation, debt crises and geopolitical conflicts had increased the strain on governments’ budgets, leaving vulnerable populations more exposed to malnutrition and disease.
However, the report did not only focus on the scale of the problem; it also underscored the progress made through innovative approaches. One example cited was the success of new agricultural technologies that had already begun transforming food production in countries like India and Kenya. These technologies had shown promise in boosting milk production and improving the nutritional quality of staple crops, directly reducing rates of child stunting.
The expansion of food fortification initiatives was another key highlight. In Nigeria, the fortification of bouillon cubes with iron, zinc and vitamin B12 was projected to prevent millions of cases of anaemia and save thousands of lives. Similarly, in Ethiopia, salt fortification efforts were helping to prevent neural tube defects and significantly reduce infant mortality.
Ultimately, the report called for a concerted global response, urging governments, donors and institutions to invest in solutions that could simultaneously address malnutrition and build resilience to climate change.
