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Ending the Double Burden of Malnutrition: Addressing the Food and Health Nexus in the Sustainable Development Goals

Iguchi, Masahiko, Tomoki Ehara, Eri Yamazaki, Tomohiro Tasaki, Naoya Abe, Seiji Hashimoto, and Taro Yamamoto.. 2014. Ending the Double Burden of Malnutrition: Addressing the Food and Health Nexus in the Sustainable Development Goals. Post2015 / UNU-IAS Policy Brief, Nr. 6.

Abstract

The International Workshop on Governance ‘of’ and ‘for’ Sustainable Development Goals, held 1 February 2014, in New York, USA, resulted in a series of policy briefs, whereof this is the sixth.

Key messages of Policy Brief #6:

  1. While the prevalence of undernourishment will decline by 2030 through various efforts by various stakeholders, eradicating undernourishment will not be achieved solely through economic growth.
  2. Improvement in economic conditions for individuals and communities may lead to higher risks of obesity unless the issue is appropriately addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), correlating targets and indicators, and delivery of educational programmes to increase health literacy globally.
  3. To approach ending the double burden of malnutrition and the challenge of dealing with undernourishment and obesity, more focus should be placed on eliminating food disparity. We recommend setting an ambitious nutritional distribution disparity target: to reduce the Interquartile Range (IQR) of the distribution of calorific intake by 50%.

The workshop was organized by the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), the Earth System Governance Project and the POST2015 project(hosted by Tokyo Institute of Technology and sponsored by Ministry of Environment, Japan). It brought together international scholars and practitioners with expertise on global environmental governance to discuss some key questions relating to the governance of, and governance for, the post-2015 development agenda. The scope of the workshop was the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with particular focus on how integrated SDGs (of development and environmental agenda) could be governed in the post-2015 era.

Future briefs and reports will be published as they become available.

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