Climate Extremes and Child Malnutrition in West Africa: Contrasting Vulnerabilities Across the Sahel and Non-Sahel

Presenter: Meriem Krouma, Researcher, Uppsala University, Sweden

Meriem Krouma is a researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on climate extremes, compound events, predictability, and their societal impacts. 

Child malnutrition remains a major public-health challenge in West Africa, where climate extremes interact with agricultural and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. This talk presents a subnational analysis of the associations between drought, heat exposure, and child malnutrition across the Sahel and Non-Sahel regions. By combining survey-based indicators of stunting and wasting with climate, agricultural, socioeconomic, and conflict data, the study identifies the factors most strongly associated with malnutrition in each region. Random Forest models, mediation analysis, and scenario-based sensitivity experiments reveal important regional differences and show that climatic hazards cannot be understood independently of the socioeconomic conditions that shape vulnerability.

Virtual
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