COP28: Number of children facing hunger due to weather extremes doubles in 2022

More than 27 million children were driven into hunger and malnutrition by extreme weather events in countries heavily impacted by the climate crisis in 2022, which was a 135 per cent jump from the previous year.

Save the Children found that children made up nearly half of the 57 million people pushed into crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse across 12 countries because of extreme weather events in 2022. This was based on data from the Integrated Food Security Classification or IPC scale, a monitoring system for assessing hunger emergencies in 58 countries, ReliefWeb reports citing a new data analysis by Save the Children ahead of COP28.

The IPC has estimated that the number of people facing hunger in countries where extreme weather events were the main driver of food crises has nearly doubled in five years - soaring to 57 million in 2022 from about 29 million people in 2018.

The majority of countries where weather extremes were the main driver of hunger last year were concentrated in the Horn of Africa, with Ethiopia and Somalia accounting for about half of 27 million children.

Some 12 countries where weather extremes were the primary driver of hunger in 2022, according to the IPC, were Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Pakistan, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.