Food and Nutrition Bulletin | March 2019
Objective: To assess the historical prevalence of inadequate zinc intake, as well as to estimate the future prevalence attributable to rising CO2.
Methods: Seven household food consumption surveys between 1983 and 2012 were used to calculate total dietary zinc, phytate, and absorbable zinc intakes and to assess the prevalence of historic inadequacy in zinc intake. The added nutritional effect of elevated CO2 on zinc intake is then modeled.
Results: Prevalence of inadequate absorbable zinc intake has increased from 17.1% (15.3%-19.0%) in 1983 to 24.6% (22.3%-27.1%) in 2011-12, corresponding to an additional 82 million people consuming inadequate zinc than would have otherwise if 1983 rates had persisted. These increases in inadequacy have been driven by a relatively constant zinc intake being increasingly insufficient to meet a 5% growth in zinc requirements due to the aging of the population. Reaching 550 ppm CO2 by 2050 could potentially increase the prevalence of inadequate zinc intake by another 3.9 percentage points (2.1-5.8), corresponding to 65 million additional people having inadequate zinc intake.Conclusions:The persistently worsening trend for zinc—opposite most other measures of human nutrition—shows that it may pose an ongoing risk unless addressed
Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.
Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.
He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.
