Yet efforts to improve the production of food—including nutritious food—will be futile if governments do not also take steps to mitigate the effects of climate change and to adapt to such change. Climate change is expected to lower agricultural yields, reducing the availability of food, and to compromise the nutritional value of crops, reducing the quality of food. These effects are likely to be quite pronounced in South Asia relative to other regions.

Overall, the trends and evidence suggest a complex set of relationships that will require countries, governments, and policy makers to take multisectoral and multidimensional approaches to tackle malnutrition in South Asia.

# **Methodology**

This paper reviews evidence published between January 2000 and June 2017. We follow the methodology used in similar systematic reviews, where the process consists of three stages: an expanded search, a screening, and coding (Hannes 2011; Tanner, Candland, and Odden 2015; Tanner et al. 2016; Critical Appraisal Skills Programme 2017).

The search strategy involved a pilot followed by comprehensive data collection. The pilot tested search terms and allowed us to gain experience with search mechanisms. On the basis of the results, we refined the concepts of interest and identified a broader set of appropriate search terms for conducting the main bibliographic database search. We used seven databases for the main search: EconLit, Science Direct, AGRICOLA, IDEAS, DIALOG, PubMed, and ERIC.<sup>3</sup> The search method used three categories of search terms. _Category A_ consists of agricultural interventions, including nutrition-sensitive agriculture; home production of nutritious and diverse foods (for example, home gardens, fisheries, livestock and poultry breeding, growth of traditional crops, and crop diversification); fortification of staple crops (for example, biofortification and fortification); value chains (encompassing storage, processing, distribution, retailing, and quality and safety controls); food environment (covering accessibility and availability, affordability and price, and acceptability and desirability); food assistance; environment and resources; and agricultural growth. _Category B_ consists of outcomes (level, quality, diversity, distribution, security, and nutrition). _Category C_ consists of the list of South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) and the regional term “South Asia.” Details on the search terms are presented in Table 1. Some searches, notably for “nutrition-sensitive agriculture” and “value chains,” yielded no relevant results and are thus omitted from discussion in the paper.<sup>4</sup> After completing the database search, we began the screening process. The screening strategy applied inclusion and exclusion criteria to determine the relevance of each study. After completing the screening, we coded in three steps for studies determined to be relevant through the screening. First, we conducted a 10-minute review of each relevant study to ensure that the

> 3 Except for IDEAS, we searched each database in its entirety for each term or set of terms. Based on initial results for all outcomes associated with a topic, we screened 100–150 papers for each agricultural intervention. If there were very few results, we moved to the next outcome.

> 4 This is not to say, however, that there is not a growing research agenda on nutrition-sensitive value chains in the region. We refer readers, for example, to a research agenda on this area by the Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) consortium.

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