Read on Twitter
. @rebaker64 and I have a new paper, "Characterizing the contribution of high temperatures to child undernourishment in Sub-Saharan Africa" out in @scireports last week. Here's a brief summary for #ClimateTwitter #EconTwitter and #EpiTwitter http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-74942-9
Better data and methods have driven insights into #climateimpacts on #publichealth. Some relationships, such as high temperature's with mortality, are so well understood that we can use them to study climate adaptation more generally. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27599
2/n
2/n
Combining #causalinference #stats with large survey datasets has uncovered early life damages as well. High temperatures can reduce fertility, lower birth weights, and do enough damage in-utero to reduce health and income decades later. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/51/13447
3/n
3/n
But there's still much we don't know about heat effects on child health, especially in warmer countries. Food security, vector borne-diseases, pollution, and a host of factors can all worsen sharply. What's the net effect?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43755229
4/n
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43755229
4/n
@rebaker64 and I join height and weight data from 190K children in sub-Saharan Africa with historical climate data to estimate high temperatures' net effect on nutrition. The average relationship turns out to be strong enough to see in the raw cross section:
5/n
5/n
Of course correlations can only say so much, so we use a #causalinference design to identify heating effects at different time scales, using variation in the weather over the month and year prior to survey, as well as over each child's lifetime.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.52.3.740
6/n
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.52.3.740
6/n
Annual heating in rural areas sharly increases weight loss above 25C, and echoes the heat wave-driven yield collapses we see in agronomy. Heating the month of survey does little in rural areas, but lowers weights and increases diarrhea rates in urban areas.
7/n
7/n
We look at a variety of additional measures, and show that most of the decline in weight with heat is likely due to heat per se, which is bad news given #ClimateChange.
If you have questions please reach out to me or @rebaker64 ( https://rachelelizabethbaker.com/ ).
8/8
If you have questions please reach out to me or @rebaker64 ( https://rachelelizabethbaker.com/ ).
8/8
