Drought and conflict slash crop yields.

Food prices rise.

Families buy cheaper, less nutritious food.

Child malnutrition rises.

To Shibani Ghosh, associate professor of nutritional sciences in the College of Human Ecology, the chain of events leading to poor nutrition couldn’t be clearer.

But for most of the world, it might as well be invisible. Doctors treat the malnourished child. Nobody in the clinic is tracking the harvest.

That gap is what Ghosh and her colleagues are trying to close. Ghosh is lead author of the 2026 Global Nutrition Report, an independent assessment that says converging crisis conditions require coordinated climate-resilient food and health systems to protect nutrition, and a siloed approach to hunger is dangerously inadequate. The report was released May 28 in Rome at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Challenges to the food or health system in any country due to geopolitical conflicts, crop failure and adverse climate events may occur simultaneously.

“Protecting nutrition during a crisis requires investing in coordinated and integrated action and infrastructure – before the crisis occurs,” Ghosh said.

Some 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, according to FAO estimates. Estimates indicate that climate change alone could push an additional 28 million children into acute wasting and 40 million into stunting – the kind of early life nutritional damage that dims cognitive development, shrinks earning potential and cuts lives short.

The funding designed to address this is declining. The report suggests that diminishing donor support for global nutrition targets would leave 2.3 million severely malnourished children without treatment and contribute to roughly 369,000 additional child deaths annually.

“Global funding cuts intensify risk,” Ghosh said. “With rising malnutrition, climate shocks and food price volatility, the long-term economic costs are likely to far exceed the short-term savings.”

Ghosh and her co-authors draw on published evidence and country-level experience to show what intentional integration of preventative efforts looks like when it works. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, countries that had already built connections across food, health and social protection systems responded faster and more effectively than those improvising from scratch.

In the fight against hunger, India used schools, health clinics and government-funded safety net programs simultaneously to protect child nutrition. Sierra Leone shifted vitamin A supplementation from mass campaigns into routine health care, managing to sustain and even scale up delivery. South Africa digitized social protection enrollment while expanding hygiene programs and food access. The throughline: flexibility, preexisting infrastructure and the refusal to treat food and health as somebody else’s problem.

The lesson Ghosh and her colleagues draw is pointed: Investing in integrated systems before a shock hits diminishes the damage afterward.

The report offers a synthesis of food systems strategies for policy designers and planners, highlighting the need to consider tradeoffs that may lead to unintended consequences. For example, recommendations to adopt a plant-rich diet may not recognize the extent of micronutrient deficiencies in vulnerable population sub-groups like pregnant and lactating women.

The report also takes aim at the gap between what governments promise and what they fund. At last year’s Nutrition for Growth summit, a major nutrition conference in Paris, over half of governments’ commitments focused on food systems actions scored well on specificity and measurability. But almost none of the food-system commitments included confirmed financing. And 70% of all commitments contained no reference to gender, despite strong evidence that women’s empowerment measurably improves nutrition outcomes for entire households.

“The near-absence of gender considerations in food system commitments is a serious oversight,” Ghosh said. “We have robust evidence that investing in women’s empowerment and agency improves nutrition outcomes for entire households. Leaving that out isn’t just an equity failure, it’s a missed opportunity for impact.”

Change doesn’t necessarily require new institutions. Roughly $540 billion in annual agricultural subsidies already flow globally, much of it supporting commodity crops and emissions-intensive livestock, according to the report. Redirecting a fraction toward fruits, vegetables and legumes could reshape both dinner tables and the atmosphere. Embedding nutrition targets inside national climate plans, which only 2% of countries currently do, would unlock climate finance for nutrition programs that are currently starved of it.

The report ultimately asks for radical intentionality, Ghosh said: People designing food policy must think about health, people running health systems must think about food and pledges made in summit halls must come with real budgets.

“Protecting nutrition gains requires intentionality with explicit actions,” Ghosh said. “Policy choices must ensure that the costs of those decisions do not fall most heavily on those already at greatest risk.”