4 key facts about climate change and school meals

More extreme weather and shifting growing seasons are putting pressure on school meal programs, which serve nearly half a billion children worldwide.

Jennifer Burney, a professor of Earth system science and of environmental social sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, studies these changes and how they affect children’s health and well-being. 

School meals do far more than fill stomachs. “School meals are a really interesting way of doing two things at once – setting a strong foundation for healthy individuals and societies, and building a climate-friendly and climate-resilient food system,” Burney said. Her work shows that while climate change is already diminishing crop yields and driving up food prices, it also reveals opportunities to strengthen school meal programs in ways that benefit both people and the planet on the very small budgets most programs must adhere to.

Here are four key facts drawn from Burney’s research.

Climate change and food are deeply connected.

Climate change is already undermining agriculture as shifting rainfall patterns, extreme temperatures, and longer dry spells cut yields of many food crops. “We are producing less than we would have been able to produce absent climate change,” Burney said.

At the same time, the global food system is a major contributor to climate change through emissions associated with clearing land, fertilizing crops, raising livestock, transporting and packaging food items, and other steps along the way from field to fork. Overall, roughly one third of annual greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are linked to food. Land-use changes such as conversion of forests and grasslands to cropland or pasture account for well over half of those emissions.

“We are in a bad feedback loop,” Burney said. Climate change makes staple grains, fruits, and root vegetables harder to grow in many farming regions, she said, and people often respond by expanding cropland or intensifying production in ways that generate even more emissions, exacerbating both food insecurity and environmental risk. 

School meal programs provide essential nutrition for children and drive economic growth.

Children are especially vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition. “Kids can suffer from malnutrition over short time periods, and the negative impacts can persist for a lifetime,” Burney said. Because children lack economic and political agency, she said, they depend entirely on adults and institutions to protect their access to nutritious food.

The enormous scale of school meal programs makes them expensive, Burney said, but the return is significant. In the United States alone, the federal government invests about $18 billion annually to run school meal programs, generating an estimated $40 billion or more per year in human health and economic benefits. Families receiving federal child nutrition programs incur fewer costs related to health care, and children have better educational and longer-term economic outcomes that follow from improved nutrition. 

“This doesn’t count all of the longer-run good that accrues from having a lifelong foundation of good nutrition and health as a child,” Burney said. “But we know school meals could be so much better, both for kids and for the planet. There are a lot of great people working on the nutrition side; we are trying to complement that and think about these programs as a powerful way to care for people and the planet at the same time.”

Burney’s research shows that climate change is already putting these benefits at risk. Climate-driven disruptions to crop yields, food prices, and supply chains threaten program stability, particularly in low-resource settings where budgets are already stretched thin. 

Government-supported food programs influence agricultural practices.

Governments around the world recognize school meals as a cost-effective way to safeguard nutrition for all kids. Typically, they focus on logistics and feeding as many children as possible on extremely limited budgets, Burney said, but this misses an opportunity. If governments prioritize nutritious, climate-friendly foods for school meals, they can create incentives that reshape agricultural production and supply chains.

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Burney has started to bring staff and leadership from school meal programs in East Africa, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas into conversation with researchers about how to source food in a way that improves resilience. “At the same time, we are starting conversations with leaders and policymakers to socialize this idea that school meal procurement is a really powerful lever for change. If they want kids to be eating X, Y, and Z at school, they can create the demand that changes their own agricultural systems to be more resilient and provide those foods,” Burney said.

Farming practices that help plants tolerate extreme weather can stretch school meal budgets to feed more kids.

To understand how climate change affects school meal programs, Burney and colleagues, including Stanford food security expert Rosamond Naylor and Planetary Health Postdoctoral Fellow Natalie Lambrecht, analyzed changes in crop productivity for foods commonly served in national programs worldwide. The team developed climate risk profiles for individual programs based on historical climate data and information about school meal menus and program size. 

Burney was pleasantly surprised to learn that more than 100 countries around the world have line items in their national budgets for school feeding programs, and that many have climate and environment-related goals in their policies and programs.

But their preliminary findings show that, on current budgets, school meal programs are serving at least 1 million fewer children than they could have without climate change, due to declining yields and reduced food availability. “It was absolutely crushing to learn that the median program is working with about 35 cents per kid per day,” Burney said. “This is a current problem and one that we now know is going to get worse for most places.” 

The research highlights clear opportunities for improvement. Burney explains that farmers in many regions can offset some of the effects of climate change through simple techniques that retain soil moisture, reduce erosion, and enhance carbon storage in soil. Her team applied research findings from Stanford ecologist Adam Pellegrini’s lab to estimate that adoption of practices such as cover cropping and reduced tillage would improve crop productivity and resilience, and thus reduce costs enough to allow programs to serve 8 million more children on the same budgets. The research also identifies less-studied grains and legumes that can tolerate longer dry spells and more extreme heat than many foods currently served.