Day: January 12, 2023

Tiny Bassma Mofeed fell ill when she was just a few months old, battling a soaring fever and mouth problems. Her mother, Hana Abdullah, tried to soothe her with cold compresses.

A resident of the southeastern city of Taiz, in conflict-torn Yemen—where access to affordable, nutritious food and health care is increasingly difficult—she had few other means to help her daughter recover.

“Life is hard,” mother Hana said. “We can hardly afford food.”

Like many other Yemeni children, Bassma suffered from acute malnutrition — a growing global crisis with lasting and sometimes deadly effects on young children, especially in some of the world’s poorest countries.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has now joined four other United Nations agencies (the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO)) to launch a call for action targeting more than a dozen of the hardest-hit countries, including Yemen.

The collective response comes under the UN Global Action Plan on Child Wasting, a joint effort to prevent, detect and treat wasting globally. The plan outlines the critical need for a multi-sectoral approach to acute malnutrition, including priority actions across food, health, nutrition, water and sanitation, and social protection systems.

Scaling up these actions as a coordinated package is essential to prevent and treat acute malnutrition in children among nutritionally vulnerable populations.

“More than 30 million children are acutely malnourished across the 15 worst-affected countries, so we must act now and act together,” says WFP’s Executive Director David Beasley. “It is critical that we collaborate to strengthen social safety nets and food assistance to ensure Specialized Nutritious Foods are available to the women and children who need them the most.”

Bassma was lucky. She was treated for her moderate acute malnutrition at a WFP-supported health clinic. Now a year old, she is thriving and learning to walk.

She counts among some 20 million young children and mothers worldwide suffering from devastating forms of malnutrition that WFP worked to treat and prevent in 2022. But the needs and the challenges — including conflict, climate change, skyrocketing food and fuel prices, and a growing humanitarian financing gap — are immense. Millions of vulnerable people fall through the cracks.

In Yemen alone, where hunger is mounting, almost half of all children under 5 — or roughly 2.2 million children — along with 1.3 million pregnant and nursing women face acute malnutrition.

Struggling to survive

In sub-Saharan Africa, South Sudan is seeing conflict, climate shocks and soaring food and fuel costs exacerbating already alarming rates of malnutrition.

“More than 60 percent of the population — including two million young children and pregnant and nursing mothers — are struggling to survive the peak of the lean season,” says Makena Walker, WFP’s Acting Country Director in South Sudan. “Young children and pregnant and breastfeeding women are the most vulnerable to acute malnutrition.”

Among them is 27-year-old Nyariek Bol, uprooted a decade ago by her country’s long-running conflict and now living in a camp for displaced people in the capital Juba. Pregnant with her second child, she was treated for malnutrition last year, receiving a nutrient-packed blend of fortified cereals from WFP.

“When I gave birth, the baby was healthy,” said Nyariek, whose son Tesloach was born last August weighing a robust 3.5 kilos.

Critical, timely nutrition support by WFP and our partners has helped keep many like Nyariek and her baby healthy. But South Sudan’s challenges — including being on the frontlines of the climate crisis — are daunting, and a funding shortfall has forced WFP to prioritize its humanitarian assistance to only the hungriest.

Today, some 1.4 million children in South Sudan suffer from malnutrition. More than 100,000 risk dying if not treated.

In Ethiopia, too, unrest and climate shocks are pushing hunger and malnutrition to alarming levels, devastating many communities and livelihoods.

In the country’s southern Borena zone, a punishing drought has wiped out livestock that is a vital source of food and income for the area’s pastoral community.

The fallout has taken an especial toll on young children like 18-month-old Liben Kefela, whose family eats only a single bowl of maize porridge once daily.

“Our livestock have perished and the surviving ones very weak and have no market value,” says Liben’s mother Shedole, whose son was so weak that she took him to hospital.

Diagnosed with malnutrition, Liben is receiving WFP’s specialized nutrition-packed food supplements. His mother hopes her children will grow up healthy and well educated. But for now, life is a matter of survival.

“Without this support, only God knows what the fate of my child will be,” she says of the WFP assistance. “I had no other means to help him.”

Buffering shocks

There are some answers, however. In Bahr El-Gazal in central Chad, where recurrent food and nutrition crises are common, the harsh climate, poor rainfall, insecurity and border closures are destroying livelihoods.

But the WFP-supported Tchiworou Health Center has proven a key buffer against further hardship, by delivering health and nutrition services to nearby communities.

“An integrated package of services is important: good hygiene practices, access to clean water and sanitation, along with care and feeding for young children — including promoting breastfeeding for infants — all help reduce the incidence of acute malnutrition,” says WFP Chad nutrition officer Haisset Fanga.

Still, in many countries where WFP works, sharply rising prices threaten hard-won gains in building longer-term food and nutrition security and resilience. Across the Central Sahel region where Chad is located, for example, an estimated 6 million children faced acute malnutrition last year.

But in nearby Burkina Faso, a WFP project is strengthening national food systems so people — especially young children and pregnant and breastfeeding women — can access and afford a nutritious, diverse diet.

Supported by the European Union, the initiative — also rolled out in Mali and Niger — offers a comprehensive approach to the Central Sahel’s food and nutrition crisis, by also targeting the production, transformation and marketing of nutritious foods for vulnerable communities.

“We can help women and children improve their nutritional status and strengthen systems to help prevent malnutrition in future generations,” says Simon Kiendrebeogo, a WFP nutrition associate for the project in Kaya, a city northeast of Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou.

The project reaches women like Sawadogo Mamounata, who receives WFP vouchers to help her buy nutritious, fortified food. This keeps her healthy and strong while she is breastfeeding and helps her young children to thrive.

“There is a change in my children, I think it’s linked to the fortified flour we receive,” Sawadogo says. “The children are much more fit than before. My youngest one is already walking at 10 months.”

Source: World Food Programme

Last year was one of the the warmest on record, according to data released Thursday by two U.S. government agencies, and was marked by numerous instances of severe weather around the globe, many of which are exacerbated by global warming.

The Earth’s average global surface temperature was 0.86 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average in 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This made it the sixth-warmest year on record by NOAA’s reckoning, and the fifth-warmest by NASA’s. (The discrepancy between the two is the result of a measurement difference of a tiny fraction of a degree.)

The high temperatures in 2022 were particularly remarkable because of the presence of a major weather phenomenon over the Pacific Ocean called La Niña, which drove global temperatures down by approximately 0.06 degrees, Gavin A. Schmidt, chief of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a conference call with journalists.

Russell Vose, chief of the analysis and synthesis branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said the individual rankings of specific years are less important than the overall trend of a warming planet. Each of the past eight years has been among the eight hottest years on record.

“It’s clear that each of the past four decades has been warmer than the decade that preceded it,” said Vose. “There’s really been a steady rise in temperature since at least the 1960s.”

He added, “It’s certainly warmer now than at any time in at least the past 2,000 years, and probably much longer.”

Regional differences

Differences in global surface temperature were not evenly distributed, with some regions experiencing much higher-than-average temperatures, while others had lower temperatures. While Central Europe experienced significantly higher temperatures than normal, for example, the temperatures of the U.S. Midwest were lower than average. The Northern Hemisphere, for example, was 1.1 degrees Celsius above average last year, while the Southern Hemisphere was up only 0.61 degrees.

Asia experienced its second-hottest year on record, as did Europe. In Africa, though, 2022 was only the tenth-hottest year on record. It was the 12th-hottest year recorded in South America, the 15th-hottest in North America and in the top 20 for Oceania.

Much of the increased heat was focused on the polar regions, which led to significant loss of sea ice. In 2022, average sea ice cover in the Antarctic was near record lows, at 10.5 square kilometers. In the Arctic, sea ice covered 10.6 square kilometers, the 11th-lowest total on record.

In addition, average ocean surface temperatures, which are measured up to a depth of 2,000 meters, were the highest on record. The four highest average global ocean temperatures ever recorded have all occurred in the four years since 2019.

Major weather events

Last year also saw a large number of extreme weather events, including crippling droughts in the western U.S., East Africa and much of Europe, while Pakistan, China and Australia all battled devastating floods.

While major storm systems were not more common than average in 2022, North America suffered a series of extremely damaging hurricanes, while East Asia was battered by several destructive typhoons.

The scientists presenting the NOAA/NASA data declined to blame severe weather events specifically on climate change, but they noted that warmer temperatures create conditions that allow storms to become more damaging than they might otherwise be.

‘Flirting’ with 1.5 degrees Celsius

Countries around the world have reached a number of agreements meant to try to keep average global temperature increases limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (a different, lower baseline than the 20th century average cited above).

Vose said the Earth is already “flirting” with a 1.5-degree increase now, adding that it would not be surprising for a single year in the 2020s to top that number. That would not be the same as reaching a multiyear average increase of 1.5 degrees, though.

Schmidt said the Earth’s average temperature currently stands at between 1.1 and 1.2 degrees above the preindustrial average, and is climbing.

He said the current rate of warming is just over 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. If that rate remains unchanged, within 20 years, the global average will hit 1.5 degrees.

However, he added, continued increases are not inevitable.

“Future warming is a function of future emissions of carbon dioxide. So, we as a society, collectively, we still have agency,” Schmidt said. “So, what we are going to do in the future is going to determine what happens in the future. And so, if we continue to emit at the rate that we are emitting right now, then we are going to continue to warm, and we would be pretty much rushing past 1.5. If we collectively reduce emissions quite quickly, then we can avoid the higher temperatures.”

Climate activists frustrated

Climate activists saw Thursday’s report as further confirmation of the dire effects of global warming and the insufficiency of past efforts to slow it.

“It’s a lot of what we already know — just more confirmation,” said Cherelle Blazer, senior director of the International Climate and Policy Campaign at the Sierra Club. “We’re already at 1.1 degrees warming. All the world’s scientists say that we need to stick to 1.5 in order to not see the worst of the climate catastrophe happen. And no one seems to be willing to do what’s necessary to achieve that. I find it very disheartening.”

Blazer said she hopes the NOAA/NASA report will spur the new Congress into action, particularly in efforts to fully implement the many carbon-reduction efforts included in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, to finance the Green Climate Fund, and to take steps to compensate low-income countries for the disproportionate damage they face from global warming.

“I’m hoping that the Biden administration, our new Senate and our new House — our newly elected officials — are ready to roll up their sleeves and stop playing around with people’s lives,” she said.

Source: Voice of America