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Abstract
Malnutrition is viewed as one of climate change's five most considerable adverse health impacts. As many previous studies have shown correlations between climate, food production, and social factors on the nutritional status of women, we hypothesized a causal effect of climate variations on crop production, household food security, and our outcome, the nutritional status of adult women. Using a cohort design, we ensured a temporal relationship between the main exposures preceding the mediator and the outcome. Women living in 904 households from nine randomly selected subsistence farming in rural Kebeles, the lowest administrative unit in the Boricha district, were visited quarterly to collect nutritional status (outcome variable), household food security status (HHFS), and sociodemographic information. Climate data was obtained from the Google Earth Engine. Generalized structural equation modeling (GSEM) was used to measure the association between rainfall, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), a proxy measure for crop production, and women’s nutritional status (BMI) after adjusting for the mediation effect of HHFS. The analysis adjusted the clustering effect of Kebele and household. The study showed that the NDVI and HHFS directly affected women’s body mass index. Furthermore, household heads who attended primary education, total energy expenditure of women, and household wealth were positively associated with women’s BMI. On the other hand, older women and women who were not members of a community-based health insurance household had a lower BMI. Climate variability, crop production, and household food security could be causally linked to women’s nutritional status, suggesting that rural people depending on rain-fed subsidence farming for crop production are vulnerable to the impact of climate variability.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31223/X56Q6S
Subjects
Medical Sciences
Keywords
Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Women, BMI, Climate variability, Mediation Analysis, household food security, famine
Dates
Published: 2024-06-22 12:33
Last Updated: 2024-06-22 19:33
License
CC BY Attribution 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Data Availability (Reason not available):
The datasets used in this study can be upload into data repository up on acceptance
Conflict of interest statement:
No competing interests
There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.