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Hunger-Related Child Deaths Today
+4 per minute · since 00:00 UTC
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 attributes around 45% of all under-five deaths to undernutrition; this counter applies that share to the UN IGME total.
This counter used to report all hunger deaths at 25,000 a day, a figure with no attributable source. It now reports the narrower quantity that WHO and UN IGME between them actually publish, which is roughly a quarter of the old number. 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 every signal 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.