1  Problem formulation

You are reading the work-in-progress of this report. This chapter is currently a dumping ground for ideas, and I don’t recommend reading it.

The relationships between food production and consumption, known as food systems, have been identified as key drivers of the global syndemic of obesity, malnutrition, and climate change, constituting the primary challenge for humans in the 21st century, according to The Lancet Commission on Obesity report (Swinburn et al., 2019). In Brazil, we already see evidence of this challenge with over 60% of the population overweight and more than 10 million people facing severe food insecurity (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, 2020). At the same time, food production accounts for about 70% of greenhouse gas emissions in the country (Azevedo et al., 2018). These three pandemics (obesity, malnutrition, and climate change) are interconnected, as climate change impacts people’s health, food and nutrition security, malnutrition, and obesity, especially in vulnerable populations such as children. Extreme weather events can lead to loss or reduction in food production such as fruits, vegetables, and legumes, which can reduce consumption of these foods and increase consumption of ultra-processed foods as substitutes, negatively impacting malnutrition and obesity levels (Swinburn et al., 2019). In Brazil, 7% of children under five years old are stunted and 5% are overweight for their age (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2022), which are considered non-ideal rates by the World Health Organization (WHO) (United Nations Children’s Fund et al., 2023). However, little is known about the relationship between these anthropometric indicators and environmental factors such as local climate change.

Despite advances in the study of health and climate change within food systems, there are still significant gaps and challenges, such as:

  1. Lack of integration of climate investigations with health repercussions;
  2. Scarcity of studies evaluating the global syndemic from the perspective of complex systems, given the non-linear characteristics of the identified phenomena;
  3. Absence of disaggregated analyses with Brazilian health and climate data at subnational levels, which is crucial due to the diversity of the country’s social, cultural, and economic contexts;
  4. Lack of in-depth studies on food system modeling that incorporate SUS (Brazilian Unified Health System) data and consider the most vulnerable groups such as children.

With the present study, it will be possible to address some of these gaps and enhance the use and integration of public data to understand the possibilities of mitigating or exacerbating the syndemic of malnutrition, overweight, and climate change among children under five years old served by SUS.