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+4 per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/hunger-related-child-deaths-today.
Estimated, not measured
The world grows enough food. Hunger at this scale is a distribution and income failure, not a production one — which is why it tracks conflict and currency collapse more closely than it tracks harvests.
Estimated deaths of children under five since midnight UTC in which undernutrition was a contributing cause: WHO's share of under-five deaths attributed to undernutrition, applied to UN IGME's total.
This counter used to report all hunger deaths, at a figure with no attributable source. It now reports the narrower quantity that WHO and UN IGME between them actually publish, which is far smaller. The smaller figure is the better one.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
WHO attributes ~45% of under-five deaths to undernutrition; applied to the UN IGME total.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
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