Climate Change and Human Health: Contextual and Compositional Effects of Climate, Livelihoods, and Population Change on Child Malnutrition in Mali, Africa

Marta M. Jankowska, San Diego State University
Kelyvn Jones, University of Bristol
David Lopez-Carr, University of California, Santa Barbara
Zoe Chafe, University of California, Berkeley

The drivers and outcomes of climate change are often studied at course scales, yet the events that lead to child malnourishment are inherently local, revolving around economics, livelihoods, demographics, and adaptation. This study builds off previous research of modeling climate change and malnutrition in Mali, Africa, extending the analysis with additional contextual variables and introducing a multi-level analysis. Drawing on 407 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) clusters with a total of 14,238 children, we model climate, livelihoods, and population in a multivariate regression to examine outcomes of two measures of malnutrition - stunting and underweight. We then bring the analysis into a multi-level model to explore the hierarchical structure of climactic impacts on malnutrition. Preliminary and expected results indicate that climate works through livelihoods and population change to impact malnutrition both at the cluster and individual levels.