Page - 14 - in options, Volume summer 2019

Food needs for decent living In a 2018 study, IIASA researchers showed that two-thirds of the population of India — around 800 million people — are affected by nutrient deficiencies. Narasimha Rao, explored this issue as part of the Decent Living Energy project. “I was trying to assess the energy needs for every dimension of decent living,” says Rao. “What decent living is from a food perspective is more than just calories. Good health and longevity also require a good dose of vitamins and minerals. Many of those are lacking in poor countries.” The study found that many diets in India lacked iron, which can be harder to obtain in a vegetarian diet. Counterintuitively, inadequate nutrition can also go hand in hand with obesity, which food researchers refer to as the “dual burden” of malnutrition. “Food prices affect the choice of food, and for low-income families in developing countries, it is often more economical to opt for low-cost but energy-dense commercial foods that are generally poor in nutrients,” explains Raya Muttarak, an IIASA demographer who has previously worked on questions of climate vulnerability and resilience. “In fact, even within the same individual, people who were undernourished in early childhood are also particularly susceptible to becoming obese when they grow up.” Muttarak is working to understand how climate change will affect this double burden. In an editorial in Asian Population Studies, Muttarak suggests that building capacity to cope with climatic shocks will be an important aspect of addressing this problem. Meanwhile, Luan and researchers in the IIASA Water Program published a new metric for energy and nutrients, which could be used to assess whether diets are meeting people’s nutritional needs on a national or international scale. “There is relatively little research assessing the nutritional adequacy of dietary intake according to dietary standards like the World Health Organization’s global-level recommendations and national-level nutritional plans, and to explore its relationship with nutritional outcomes,” says Luan. The climate-food puzzle As researchers look 30 to 50 years into the future, the impact of climate change on food production looms as a challenge. With crop production already impacted by drought and temperature © Dusan Kostic | Dreamstime Adam Islaam | IIASA www.iiasa.ac.at14 Options Summer 2019