According to the new Gate Foundation report released yesterday, Wednesday, September 18, recent projections indicate that 40 million more children will suffer the worst effects of hunger by 2050 due to climate change. But immediate action could instead improve health and boost economic growth. To this end, it called for targeted funding for global health to save millions of children from malnutrition and disease.
In its eighth annual Goalkeepers report, “The Race to Feed a Warming World,” released yesterday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation urged world leaders to increase global health spending where it is needed most, to improve children’s health and nutrition, particularly in the face of the global climate crisis. The report found that without immediate global action, climate change will condemn an additional 40 million children to stunting and 28 million to wasting between 2024 and 2050.
According to Mr. Gates, malnutrition is “the world’s worst child health crisis” and climate change is only making it worse. In light of this, Mr. Gates calls for maintaining funding for global health, and for immediately addressing the growing threat of child malnutrition by supporting the Child Nutrition Fund. “If we do these three things, we will not only usher in a new era of global health and save millions of lives, we will also prove that humanity is still capable of tackling its greatest challenges,” Mr. Gates writes.
On climate change, the foundation said: “The best way to combat the effects of climate change is to invest in nutrition… Malnutrition makes every step forward that our species wants to take heavier and more difficult. But the reverse is also true. If we solve malnutrition, we help solve all the other problems. We solve extreme poverty. Vaccines are more effective. And deadly diseases like malaria and pneumonia become much less deadly.”
Denise Zarour Medang
