Developing world articles from across Nature Portfolio

Large-scale food fortification can be an effective strategy to address hidden hunger, but only if vulnerable populations actually eat the fortified foods. A systemic framework using publicly available data from ten West African countries reveals that a wider mix of fortified foods than are currently considered for fortification is needed for building more equitable programmes.

China’s dietary transitions improve health outcomes but increase environmental pressures, with faster health gains but rising environmental impacts in urban areas and slower health gains yet higher environmental burdens in rural areas, according to analysis combining environmental and health indicators and scenario modeling

Behavioral differences across user groups reveal affordability constraints in pay-as-you-go solar, according to an analysis of over 220000 payment time-series with unsupervised deep learning.

Weather forecasts help societies protect against adverse weather and adapt to climate risk. This paper shows that forecasts are far less accurate in low-income countries and links this gap to both fundamental predictability and less dense observation networks.

Adaptation costs vary across social financial and environmental contexts and cannot be understood through compensation alone, according to a mixed methods study combining interviews and stated preference analysis in Uganda.

Medication that persists inside the body for months or years could transform the treatment and prevention of many conditions — especially in low- and middle-income countries.

Large-scale food fortification can be an effective strategy to address hidden hunger, but only if vulnerable populations actually eat the fortified foods. A systemic framework using publicly available data from ten West African countries reveals that a wider mix of fortified foods than are currently considered for fortification is needed for building more equitable programmes.

Past biofuel expansions reveal that when industrial-scale investment outpaces land governance, independent scrutiny and community participation, low-carbon crop transitions can reproduce land concentration, displacement and ecological simplification. A close examination of an emerging biofuel frontier in Brazil shows why land rights, public accountability and equitable benefit-sharing must guide crop-based decarbonization from the outset.

A neighborhood-scale model estimates that about 395 million people across 103 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean live in morphologically deprived areas — neighborhoods that are densely built, cramped and poorly connected by roads. More than one-third of these people live in small- and medium-sized cities, which reveals deprivation beyond the megacities that dominate global attention.

Building a high-integrity biodiversity credit market requires recognition of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities as stewards of nature. Including culturally salient species as a metric in the measurement and monitoring of biodiversity credits — with the consent and guidance of Indigenous and local authorities — may be one pathway towards this pursuit.