Climate informed early warning system for malnutrition prevention

Abstract

Malnutrition is a health condition which is caused by a lack of enough food intake, not eating enough of the right combination of food, or the body’s failure to utilize the food eaten. It manifests itself in two forms: undernutrition or over nutrition. Climatic variability affects many underlying determinants of child malnutrition, including food availability, access, and utilization. Weather conditions continue to change at uncontrollable rate. The continuous change brings about unbearable hazard which needs high precision tools for its control. The global community have understood that the potential magnitude, harshness and impact of the symptoms of weather changes such as: global warming, loss of crops through over extensive periods of drought, unpredictable rainfall patterns, melting glaciers, displaced populations in search of refuge after floods, or entire villages devastated by the cruel force of cyclones and hurricanes on upcoming generations will be very intense. Early warning is a major element of disaster risk reduction. It prevents loss of life and reduces the economic and material impact of disasters. Therefore, the system proposed is an early warning system that uses real time data easily accessible over a very wide range of sources monitoring climate changes like temperature, rainfall, crop data and be able to process it thereafter make the information available on a web platform for easy dissemination of critical information