Even with concerted action on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), under-5 malnourishment and mortality in India would still be above the world average, as per a study. Currently, India is just behind Nigeria at the top among the ten countries with the highest number of under-5 deaths.
But the 2050 projections at 8% and 10 per 1,000 livebirths, respectively, is better than the current showing, according to the State of India’s Environment (SoIE) 2022, brought out by Down to Earth magazine on Tuesday.
A study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University (USA), the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and WHO (published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health last year in November) posits that India has registered a sharper decline for most causes of death in the under-5 cohort in the SDG period (2015-2030) as compared to the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) period (2000-2015). Though, among neonates “mortality due to congenital abnormalities and intrapartum-related events is declining more slowly than other causes of mortality.”
Last year, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health had reported a sharp jump in coverage of the vaccine against rotavirus, a pathogen causing diarrhoea, which is among the top causes of death among children in India. The country had included the vaccine in its Universal Immunisation Programme in 2016. Access to sanitation, under the Swacch Bharat programme, has also increased. The government is targetting to end diarrhoeal morbidity and mortality in children this year, even as close to 56,000 under-5 children are estimated to have died in 2019 from diarrhoeal diseases, as per a January 2022 study published in BMC Public Health, a Springer Nature journal. There has been, though, a sharp decline in diarrhoeal deaths amongst under-5 children since the 1990, falling from 309 per 100,000 population to 47 in 2019.
Among other findings, SoIE 2022 also shows that any decarbonising effort will have to account for food system emissions (from production to consumption, including distribution and disposal) given food practices globally contribute to 21-37% of greenhouse gas emitted annually. The findings are in line with those of a study published in Nature Food last year in March that estimated food system emissions between 1990 and 2015, and reported that these stood at 34% of the overall emission in 2015, down from 44% in 1990.
While emissions by livestock and poultry, from rearing to consumption, have drawn attention from climate-action advocates, the role of plant-based diet are also being studied now. Plants are seen as carbon sinks because of photosynthesis by popular reckoning, but their decomposition, especially in the context of agricultural waste, carries a significant emission foot-print.
