Conference Agenda

Access to safe drinking water is a fundamental human right, yet more than two billion people worldwide lack it, increasing the prevalence of waterborne diseases, particularly in low-income countries. Addressing this challenge requires cost-effective policies that enhance water supply while mitigating the impacts of climate shocks. This study evaluates the effectiveness of a large-scale, decentralized adaptation program designed to increase the resilience of low-income households in Brazil’s Semiarid region to recurrent droughts. The Cisterns Program constructs low-cost rainwater harvesting systems, now serving over 25% of the region’s population, primarily in remote rural areas. The analysis finds that the program significantly reduces acute diarrheal infections (ADI) and other waterborne diseases, lowering cases by 168 per 100,000 residents — a 32% decline in hospitalizations and ambulatory care. Moreover, the program fully offsets the negative health effects of drought shocks, underscoring its role in strengthening community resilience. The analysis of potential mechanisms suggest that education enhances program effectiveness, likely by improving compliance with usage guidelines and increasing agency over water resources. These findings remain robust across multiple model specifications and placebo tests, highlighting the potential of low-cost interventions as viable climate adaptation strategies, particularly in regions where large infrastructure projects are impractical.

In 2004, Italy introduced a national program to address heat-related health risks through public awareness campaigns, heatwave warning systems, and hospital protocols. Leveraging administrative mortality data, temperature variations, and the plausibly exogenous timing of the policy's rollout, this paper shows that the program mitigated the mortality impact of extreme heat (days at or above 30 °C) by more than 57%. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that the staggered implementation of the heat wave warning systems contributed to reducing excess mortality on days exceeding 30 °C in treated provinces. We further show that enhancing access to information is essential to achieving these mitigating effects. Our findings underscore the critical role of public adaptation policies that leverage information disclosure on the health risks associated with heat stress.

Climate change presents significant health risks, yet much of the existing research has focused on temperate, developed regions, leaving a critical gap in understanding its impacts on tropical, developing countries. This paper examines how temperature and humidity affect both subjective and objective human health outcomes for Indonesia’s tropical climate. Using detailed individual health data and high-resolution weather records, we explore both the contemporaneous and cumulative effects of extreme weather conditions. Our findings show that high temperatures have a contemporaneous negative impact on subjective health, while high humidity appears to have a protective effect. In contrast, objective health measures, such as lung capacity, blood pressure, and haemoglobin levels, show little response to short-term weather fluctuations, with no significant contemporaneous effects. For these objective health measures, estimates for cumulative exposure over time suggest potential physiological acclimatization to extreme conditions. These results challenge the U-shaped health-temperature relationship seen in temperate regions and emphasize the unique role of humidity in modulating the effects of temperature in coastal tropical areas. Additionally, our analysis highlights the critical role of sleep disturbances as a mediator for subjective health impacts.

This paper examines how prolonged heat exposure affects the labor force's ability to work in the short and long run. We provide the first comprehensive characterization of the occupation-specific heterogeneity in how heat-induced health damages materialize in decreased labor supply and its distributional implications. To this end, we link administrative public health insurance records for one-third of the German working-age population to the quasi-experimental occurrence of heat waves. Our findings show that an average hot day increases the number of new sick leave cases by about 3.5%. With enduring heat exposure, the effect increases to 5.0% on the third day of consecutive heat stress and roughly triples to 10.8% after seven days. Workers who are already disadvantaged in terms of their income and working conditions are more vulnerable to heat stress. Those more flexible in scheduling and adjusting their working hours are less at risk. Our results also reveal a longer-term decrease in labor supply in the years following heat wave exposure and suggest sustained increases in the demand for all healthcare services, i.e., doctor visits, hospitalizations, and pharmaceutical prescriptions.