Fighting world hunger worsened by climate change - Bill Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday called on world leaders to increase global spending on addressing childhood malnutrition, an issue escalated by climate change.

They made the appeal in its eighth annual Goalkeepers report published on Tuesday. Each year, the foundation releases a report to track progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

According to this year's report, climate change is projected to condemn an additional 40 million children to stunting and 28 million more to wasting from this year to 2050 for lack of immediate global action.

In 2023, the World Health Organization estimated that 148 million experienced stunting and 45 million experienced wasting — the two most severe forms of chronic and acute malnutrition.

Scaling up solutions now can avoid this outcome while also building resilience to climate change and spurring much-needed economic growth, said the report.

The report added that the total share of foreign aid aimed at Africa has decreased in the past two decades despite intensifying challenges.

"This trend leaves hundreds of millions of children at serious risk of dying or suffering from preventable diseases and threatens the unprecedented progress the world made in global health across Africa between 2000 and 2020," it said.

Bill Gates, report author and co-chair of the foundation, said in the report that malnutrition is "the world's worst child health crisis," and climate change is only making it worse.

He called for maintaining global health funding, immediately addressing the growing threat of child malnutrition by supporting the Child Nutrition Fund, a new platform that coordinates donor financing for nutrition, as well as governments fully funding the established institutions that have proved effective at protecting millions of lives each year.

"If we do these three things, we won't just usher in a new global health boom and save millions of lives—we'll also prove that humanity can still rise to meet our greatest challenges," he said.