Climate, Agriculture and Health using Household Survey Data

The climate change community has increasingly focused on the impact of changing precipitation and temperature on agricultural livelihoods of the poorest citizens. Given the complexity of food security and analytical methods used to connect community, agricultural and institutional resources to food security outcomes, indicators that can be compared across nations and continents are increasingly important. This project works with multiple datasets across countries in Africa and Asia to estimate the impact of changes in rainfall and temperature on human health outcomes. Household datasets include the Demographic and Health Survey datasets, Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) household surveys, percent tree cover, and satellite remote sensing-based temperature, rainfall, and vegetation data. Health outcome variables include stunting, wasting and mortality data for children under the age of five, low birth weight infants, malnutrition of women, and household hunger metrics based on perceptions of food insecurity. Of interest in this work is the increased understanding of food security issues that spatially specific observations of food insecurity from household surveys can provide over national statistics such as the FAO undernourishment metric.