Food insecurity is a major threat to global public health and sustainable development. As of 2022, 2.4 billion people worldwide experienced moderate to severe food insecurity. The occurrence and severity of food insecurity can depend greatly on power and social hierarchies, with women and girls often being less food secure than men and boys even within the same household. Moreover, social roles, such as the socialization of a mother to feed her children, impact food insecurity and its consequences. This study aims to uncover the relationships between food insecurity and mental health for women in the Chitwan Valley of Nepal. Utilizing longitudinal data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study, we connect food security data from 2015 with mental health data collected from 2016 to 2018. We find that women have a higher prevalence of major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and panic attacks than men, especially if they are experiencing food insecurity. Among women, we find that those who have recently experienced severe food insecurity have a significantly higher likelihood of meeting diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder and panic attacks than food-secure women. However, women's food insecurity is not significantly correlated with major depressive disorder. Moreover, we find that food insecurity is likely to co-occur with women's agricultural and wage work. These findings suggest a need for gender-attentive policy and programs accounting for both causes and consequences of food insecurity.

This paper explores the linkages between exposure to household shocks across early life and children’s educational and well-being outcomes in Peru. We use longitudinal survey data for a sample of 1713 children from five rounds of the Young Lives Survey to investigate how exposure to shocks across early life is linked to test scores and well-being in adolescence and to determine the extent to which critical periods of shock exposure exist. We expand on prior work by assessing the relationship between early childhood shocks and broader metrics of adolescent well-being beyond cognitive outcomes and by evaluating the cumulative impact of shocks over the course of a child’s early life. We find that exposure to a greater number of shocks across early life is negatively associated with reading and vocabulary test scores. In addition, shock exposure in adolescence—versus earlier in childhood—has the strongest negative association with testing and well-being outcomes, suggesting that older children’s time and household resources may be diverted away from learning and well-being in response to shocks. In light of increasingly frequent and severe weather events associated with climate change, as well as recent large-scale economic and health crises, policies aimed at supporting the most vulnerable children should be considered to alleviate the negative consequences of shocks on children’s educational outcomes and well-being.

Food security and adequate nutrition are critical for achieving progress toward sustainable development. Two billion people worldwide experience moderate to severe food insecurity, and rates of hunger have increased over the past several years after declining steadily for decades. The FAO attributes this increase in large part to climate change, though empirical evidence on the relationship between climatic conditions and food security remains limited. We examine this question by linking nationally representative longitudinal data from four rounds of the Tanzania National Panel Survey to high-resolution gridded climate data. We then estimate a set of fixed effects regression models to understand the linkages between recent rainy season precipitation and temperature and two indicators of household food security: Food Consumption Score (FCS) and reduced Coping Strategies Index (rCSI). We find that low rainfall—particularly dry and cool conditions—is negatively associated with food security. Moving from a typical rainfall year to a particularly dry one increases the risk of being food insecure on both measures simultaneously by 13 percentage points. This suggests that a lack of rainfall impedes households’ ability to access food, likely through reduced agricultural production and increased food prices, leading to lower dietary diversity and food shortages. Vulnerability is higher among households with fewer working age members, suggesting that households with a greater supply of labor can better withstand droughts. As climate change alters precipitation and temperature patterns over the coming decades, policies to increase resilience will be critical for improving food security, particularly among populations heavily reliant on agriculture.

The literature on climate exposures and human migration has focused largely on assessing short-term responses to temperature and precipitation shocks. In this paper, we suggest that this common coping strategies model can be extended to account for mechanisms that link environmental conditions to migration behavior over longer periods of time. We argue that early-life climate exposures may affect the likelihood of migration from childhood through early adulthood by influencing parental migration, community migration networks, human capital development, and decisions about household resource allocation, all of which are correlates of geographic mobility. After developing this conceptual framework, we evaluate the corresponding hypotheses using a big data approach, analyzing 20 million individual georeferenced records from 81 censuses implemented across 31 countries in tropical Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. For each world region, we estimate regression models that predict lifetime migration (a change in residence between birth and ages 30–39) as a function of temperature and precipitation anomalies in early life, defined as the year prior to birth to age four. Results suggest that early-life climate is systematically associated with changes in the probability of lifetime migration in most regions of the tropics, with the largest effects observed in sub-Saharan Africa. In East and Southern Africa, the effects of temperature shocks vary by sex and educational attainment and in a manner that suggests women and those of lower socioeconomic status are most vulnerable. Finally, we compare our main results with models using alternative measures of climate exposures. This comparison suggests climate exposures during the prenatal period and first few years of life are particularly (but not exclusively) salient for lifetime migration, which is most consistent with the hypothesized human capital mechanism.

We examine the relationships between climatic conditions, breastfeeding behavior, and maternal time use in Ethiopia. Infant feeding practices are important predictors of child nutrition that may be affected by a number of factors including mother’s time engaging in agricultural labor, food security, cultural beliefs, and antenatal care. We use panel data from the Living Standards Measurement Study to investigate linkages between climatic conditions during a child’s first year of life and year prior to birth and duration of exclusive breastfeeding. We then explore one potential mechanism: women’s agricultural labor. Results indicate that rainfall during the primary agricultural season—kiremt—in a child’s first year of life plays an important role in duration of exclusive breastfeeding. Experiencing 25 cm of average monthly kiremt rainfall, versus 5 cm, is associated with a 20-percentage-point decrease in the likelihood of being exclusively breastfed for the recommended 6 months. More kiremt rainfall is associated with a greater number of days that women spend planting and harvesting, and at high levels of rainfall women with infants do not engage in significantly fewer days of agricultural labor than those without infants. Lastly, we find that during the year before birth, greater rainfall during kiremt as well as the dry season is associated with a lower likelihood of 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding, potentially due to the early introduction of complementary foods. Our findings indicate that agricultural labor demands may in part drive breastfeeding behaviors, leading to “sub-optimal” feeding practices in the short-term, but resulting in improved household food security in the longer-term.

This paper examines the relationship between weather conditions and child nutrition in Ethiopia. We link data from four rounds of the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey to high-resolution climate data to measure exposure to rainfall and temperature in utero and during early life. We then estimate a set of multivariate regression models to understand how weather conditions impact child stunting, an indicator of sustained early life undernutrition. We find that greater rainfall during the rainy seasons in early life is associated with greater height for age. In addition, higher temperatures in utero, particularly during the first and third trimesters, and more rainfall during the third trimester, are positively associated with severe stunting, though stunting decreases with temperature in early life. We find potential evidence for a number of pathways underlying the weather-child nutrition relationship including agricultural livelihoods, heat stress, infectious disease transmission, and women's time use during pregnancy. These findings illuminate the complex pathways through which climate change may influence child health and should motivate additional research focused on identifying the causal mechanisms underlying these links.