A single bad El Niño weather event can leave nearly 6 million children undernourished, according to a new study.

That’s at least 70%—and perhaps up to three times—the number of children who have gone hungry because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

El Niño events cause weather patterns to shift across the tropics, leading to widespread impacts on agriculture, infectious diseases, and human conflicts and they occur much more frequency than pandemics.

El Niño cycles are easier to predict than pandemics like COVID-19, but can still have serious implications for children’s health, which means we should plan accordingly, says Amir Jina, assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and co-author of the paper in Nature Communications.

“Scientists can forecast an approaching El Niño up to six months in advance, allowing the international community to intervene to prevent the worst impacts,” Jina says. “Our study helps to quantify those impacts on child nutrition to guide global public investments in food-insecure areas.”

In the paper, Jina and his coauthors—Jesse Anttila-Hughes at the University of San Francisco and Gordon McCord at the University of California, San Diego—provide the first estimate of El Niño’s effects on child nutrition throughout the global tropics.

By assembling data on more than a million children spanning four decades and all developing country regions, their analysis finds that warmer, drier El Niño conditions increase undernutrition in children across most of the tropics, where 20% of children are already deemed severely underweight by the World Health Organization (WHO). That percentage ticks up by 2.9% during El Niño years.

In the case of the severe 2015 El Niño, the number of children at or below the WHO threshold for severely underweight jumped by nearly 6%—or an additional nearly 6 million children driven into hunger. While the children’s weight appears to recuperate with time, the shock on their nutrition at such a young age stunts their growth in later years.

The international community is working to eliminate all forms of undernutrition by 2030 under the framework established by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, meaning each year about 6 million children would need to escape severe hunger.

Read the full article about el niño at Futurity.