Human-caused warming linked to childhood stunting across Africa

by Renée LaReau, University of Notre Dame

edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

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In 2022, about 149 million children younger than 5 worldwide suffered from childhood stunting. A critical marker of chronic undernutrition, stunting is more than a metric of physical height. It represents a lifelong constraint on human potential, carrying a heightened risk of mortality, chronic disease, impaired cognitive development and reduced economic opportunity.

A new University of Notre Dame study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that human-caused climate change is actively worsening this public health crisis, acting alongside structural socioeconomic disparities that already challenge the next generation's ability to thrive.

Analyzing 16 years of data from 34 African countries, researchers from Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs have found that every 1°C increase in anthropogenic (human-caused) temperature anomalies is directly linked to a 3.45% rise in childhood stunting.

The finding highlights opportunities to reduce childhood stunting through policy interventions that address socioeconomic inequality while strengthening maternal education, sanitation and household resilience in poorer communities.

The 'invisible threads' of climate-driven stunting

"A single degree of warming might sound negligible in a daily weather report, but on a global scale, it alters the foundational conditions of child survival," said Arun Agrawal, Pulte Family Professor of Development Policy and co-author of the study.

"We are seeing a direct physical translation of global emissions into child undernutrition. When extreme heat limits food availability and drives up prices, young children are the very first to suffer the biological consequences. Their developing brains and bodies simply do not get the fuel they need, cementing a cycle of intergenerational poverty before they even reach their fifth birthday."

To uncover these trends, the research team used a two-step approach.

First, they used the observed daily near-surface temperatures from ERA5 weather reanalysis data to map real-world climate variability. Then, they paired these numbers with state-of-the-art climate simulations from the Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparison Project to strip away natural fluctuations and look directly at human-caused warming.

What they discovered was a striking divergence. While general weather variability showed no direct correlation to stunting, human-induced warming showed a clear and statistically significant relationship.

"This isn't an abstract problem for the future," said Nabin Pradhan, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Keough School's Pulte Institute for Global Development and the study's lead author.

"These findings underscore the importance of reducing inequality and investing in education, sanitation and household resilience to protect child health in a warming world."

For the general public, the mechanism connecting a global emissions spike to a toddler's development can seem abstract. The study highlights that global warming acts through "invisible threads," disrupting local agricultural cycles, altering food yields and leading to localized nutritional deficits that leave families unable to eat adequate meals.

The 'double whammy' of local inequality

While climate change directly increases stunting rates overall, the study reveals that structural socioeconomic inequality operates as an equally stubborn, parallel threat.

The data showed that community-level inequality is a consistent predictor of stunting. However, climate change does not strictly use inequality as a "bridge" to cause stunting; rather, the two issues stack on top of one another.

"Climate change is not a standalone threat that exists in a vacuum," said Agrawal, who directs Notre Dame's Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative.

"It acts as a threat multiplier on top of existing social fractures. If a community is already deeply unequal, a climate shock—whether it's a heat wave or a sudden drought—acts as an inescapable trap for the poorest children. The wealthy can buffer against a bad harvest by purchasing food elsewhere, but poorer households are pushed completely off the edge, losing income and losing access to basic services simultaneously."

The study shows that the direct effects of global warming are most pronounced in rural areas and places with low service accessibility. Families living far from cities, with restricted access to clean water, reliable sanitation and health care networks, bear the brunt of the shifting climate.

"When you combine low-service access—like a lack of improved sanitation or maternal education—with a sharp temperature anomaly, you get a worst-case scenario," Pradhan said.

"The groups that contributed the least to global emissions are the exact groups whose children are being structurally disadvantaged by stunting."

Designing a blueprint for the future

The researchers said their findings provide a clear, integrated roadmap for international aid organizations and local governments. Because environmental stress and structural inequality are deeply interconnected, treating climate adaptation as a purely environmental issue—such as simply building a seawall or distributing heat-tolerant seeds—is bound to fail.

"If we want to protect the next generation, we have to look at the problem through a holistic lens," Agrawal said.

"Any successful climate initiative must simultaneously be a social inequality initiative. Investments in household resilience, maternal primary education, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure are powerful public health interventions that double as climate adaptation tools."

The researchers also said that empowering mothers through education yields immediate dividends on the ground. Educated mothers are better equipped with knowledge of optimal nutritional practices and are more likely to seek medical support during early childhood illnesses.

Similarly, reliable access to clean drinking water and sanitation directly reduces repeated infections, a primary biological driver that prevents a child's body from absorbing nutrients.

Moving forward, Pradhan said the researchers plan to take this macro-level data back into the field.

"While this observational, model-backed data gives us a robust global picture, the next step is establishing deeper causality through long-term, household-level experimental studies," he said.

"Future research should examine how climate change and structural inequalities interact to influence childhood stunting, helping identify interventions that improve child health and resilience in a warming world."

Elizabeth Ludwig-Borycz, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan's Center for Health Equity, was also a co-author of the study.

Publication details

Nabin Pradhan et al, Climate change, inequality, and childhood stunting in African countries, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2518179123

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Clinical categories

PediatricsChildren's healthFamily medicineCommon illnesses & Prevention Provided by University of Notre Dame Who's behind this story?

Sadie Harley

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