CLimaKid

CLIMAKID

CLIMAKID is an interdisciplinary research project that aims to contribute to a better understanding of how climate change is affecting child health and nutrition. In particular, the project focuses on improving research capacities for climate impact attribution on child health by processing climate, agricultural, and health data and integrating them in an open-access, easy-to-use digital tool in a co-development process with scientists and stakeholders from across the most food-insecure world regions.

Climate Change & Child Health

Children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are among the most vulnerable to climate change. Undernutrition is a major threat climate change poses to child health, increasing the risk of mortality and can have lifelong consequences. The societal consequences are equally far-reaching—slowing economic growth and deepening inequalities both within and across generations.
With 99% of affected children living in LMICs, this burden falls overwhelmingly on the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Yet climate attribution research has largely focused on heat-related impacts in adult populations and high-income settings.

Addressing this gap is complex: it requires better climate data, agricultural models, and health datasets—many of which are fragmented, inaccessible, or unavailable in LMICs. CLIMAKID aims to address these gaps.

At the centre of the project is the development of MILK (Model Investigating Links between climate change and Kids’ nutrition and health) — an interactive, open-source digital platform designed to support climate attribution research related to child health and nutrition.

Climate attribution datasets

Process-based crop models

Epidemiological and health impact assessment methods

From Research to Action

The project combines climate science, agriculture, epidemiology, health research, and digital innovation to quantify the already occurring impacts of climate change on child health. Beyond generating scientific evidence, CLIMAKID also explores:

Mitigation and adaptation pathways

Intergenerational justice perspectives

Policy integration opportunities

Collaborative and accessible research workflows

Policy makers and stakeholders are involved throughout the project to help translate evidence into actionable decision-making.

Project Regions

CLIMAKID works with scientists and stakeholders across South Asia, West Africa, and East Africa—regions that face some of the world’s highest burdens of child undernutrition and climate-sensitive health risks. By strengthening climate impact attribution research in these regions, the project aims to improve understanding of how climate change is affecting child nutrition and health, and to support evidence-based decision-making.

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Child Growth Failure Data Visualization Hub. Data accessed via the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study. Image reproduced for educational and informational purposes.