This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events are no longer the only ways climate change affects children around the world. Increasingly, it also affects their diets.
Droughts reduce agricultural production, floods cut off roads and disrupt supply chains, and rising prices limit families' access to fruits, vegetables and other fresh foods. In this scenario, cheaper, longer-lasting products with low nutritional value are gaining ground, increasing the risk of two conditions that, at first glance, may seem contradictory: childhood obesity and malnutrition. The Interactive Panel on Global Syndemic in Children Under 5 seeks to highlight these relationships.
The dashboard is part of the project Global Syndemic: The Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change on the Health and Nutrition of Children Under Five Served by the Unified Health System (SUS). It presents Brazilian municipal-level data on nutritional issues and greenhouse gas emissions. The dashboard aims not only to show where malnutrition and overweight are concentrated in the country but also to help users understand how these conditions are distributed and how they relate to environmental factors.
Users can set severity alerts when more than one health issue is present in the same municipality or when conditions show a worsening trend over the years. The tool was developed by Sustentarea, a research group that brings together Brazilian researchers, students and professionals from different fields to study and develop creative interventions related to food systems, sustainable nutrition and the global syndemic. The research and outreach group is based at the School of Public Health of the University of São Paulo (FSP-USP).
The starting point for understanding this issue is that obesity, malnutrition and climate change are not isolated problems. In 2019, an international commission writing in the scientific journal The Lancet brought these three crises together under the concept of global syndemic. The term "syndemic" describes the simultaneous occurrence of two or more epidemics that interact, exacerbate each other's effects and share common social causes.
In the case of the global syndemic, obesity, malnutrition and climate change coexist and are driven by similar structural factors. These include social inequality, limited access to healthy foods and sustainable food production systems. Transportation and changes in land use also contribute, with impacts on human health and the environment.
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