Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
The Moore Center for Science at Conservation International is one of the world’s premier conservation research institutes, producing and applying groundbreaking and policy-relevant research to help decision-makers protect nature. To date, Conservation International has published more than 1,100 peer-reviewed articles, many in leading journals including Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
On average, each of our scientific papers is cited more than 45 times by other scholars — a rate exceeding that of any other U.S. conservation organization as well as leading universities.
Here is an archive of our most recent research.
Mapping the effects of drought on child stunting
Matthew W. Cooper, Molly E. Brown, Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler, Georg Pflug, Ian McCallum, Steffen Fritz, Julie Silva, Alexander Zvoleff
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116, 17219-17224
August 12, 2019
As climate change continues, it is expected to have increasingly adverse impacts on child nutrition outcomes, and these impacts will be moderated by a variety of governmental, economic, infrastructural, and environmental factors. To date, attempts to map the vulnerability of food systems to climate change and drought have focused on mapping these factors but have not incorporated observations of historic climate shocks and nutrition outcomes. We significantly improve on these approaches by using over 580,000 observations of children from 53 countries to examine how precipitation extremes since 1990 have affected nutrition outcomes. We show that precipitation extremes and drought in particular are associated with worse child nutrition. We further show that the effects of drought on child undernutrition are mitigated or amplified by a variety of factors that affect both the adaptive capacity and sensitivity of local food systems with respect to shocks. Finally, we estimate a model drawing on historical observations of drought, geographic conditions, and nutrition outcomes to make a global map of where child stunting would be expected to increase under drought based on current conditions. As climate change makes drought more commonplace and more severe, these results will aid policymakers by highlighting which areas are most vulnerable as well as which factors contribute the most to creating resilient food systems.
CITATION
Cooper, M. W., Brown, M. E., Hochrainer-Stigler, S., Pflug, G., McCallum, I., Fritz, S., … Zvoleff, A. (2019). Mapping the effects of drought on child stunting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(35), 17219–17224. doi:10.1073/pnas.1905228116
