Examining the role of agricultural adaptation strategies in reducing the impact of climate change on children's nutritional status

• Applicant: Professorin Manuela De Allegri, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409670289

Our project builds on prior research of the Research Unit's first funding phase to establish the evidence base on the negative effects of climate change on children's nutritional status in the Kossi Province (Burkina Faso) and in Siaya County (Kenya). During this second funding phase, we expand the scope of our work to generate sound scientific evidence on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of agricultural adaptation strategies in counteracting the negative effects of climate change on children's nutritional status. In line with the literature, we address both autonomous and planned agricultural adaptation strategies and purposely focus on the interventions already in place in the two settings. The resulting evidence is expected to fill important knowledge gaps by informing both the academic and the policy discourse on the role agricultural adaptation strategies can play in attenuating the negative effects of climate change on children's nutritional status. We pursue our overall goal by addressing four specific research objectives, namely: 1. to establish improved exposure-response functions (ERF) linking climate variability to food availability and children's nutritional status; 2. to quantify and understand coverage and uptake of existing planned and autonomous agricultural adaptation strategies; 3. to establish adaptation-response functions (ARF) linking the adoption of planned and autonomous agricultural adaptation strategies to food availability and children's nutritional status; 4. to establish the economic value of selected agricultural adaptation strategies. Our work adopts a mixed- and multi-methods approach, integrating different data sources across quantitative and qualitative analytical streams. The household cohorts, including 4050 children in the Kossi Province and 2784 children in Siaya County, remain at the core of our project, generating longitudinal data on children's malnutritional status with households' socio-economic contexts as well as agricultural production practices. To establish improved ERF, data on children's nutritional status over a period of five years will be matched with weather variability data obtained from the climate stations located in both study settings and with crop yield data generated via remote sensing modelling. To establish ARF, the same set of data will also be matched with data on the adoption of agricultural adaptation strategies to be collected among the complete HDSS sample and analysed using panel data analysis methods. Data on the effectiveness of selected adaptation strategies will be matched with data on their costs to estimate cost-effectiveness in comparison to status quo agricultural practice. Qualitative data will be used to integrate quantitative findings to explain what environmental and household factors shape adoption decisions and the production of effects on children's nutritional status.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2936: Climate Change and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
• International Connection: Burkina Faso, Kenya
• International Co-Applicants: Stephen Munga, Ph.D.; Ali Sié, Ph.D.