Effect of climate change on the health and nutritional status of children and their families in Africa: Scoping review

The health and nutritional status of children and their families is essential particularly during climate change. Most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) affect children in some way, namely, poverty (SDG 1), hunger (SDG 2), health (SDG 3), climate change (SDG 13). Evidence suggests that most countries are behind in achieving the SDGs, with only 17% of the SDGs currently achieved. The reason is because the SDGs are interconnected such that failure in one SDG, may affect the others negatively. For example, evidence from the global north provides many examples of the effects of climate change on other SDGs, particularly health. Within the global south, evidence of the effects of climate change on health is limited. This scoping review aims to document the effects of climate change on the health and nutritional status of children and their families in Africa. The review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). Three electronic databases were searched by a librarian. One reviewer screened the articles to be included in the synthesis and a second author went through the selected articles to confirm their inclusion. Data was extracted and mapped according to four categories: i) climate change events or phenomena, ii) effect of climate change on nutritional and health status, iii) factors influencing vulnerabilities of population to climate change, iv) interventions and innovations used to mitigate impact of climate change on health.