Conference Agenda

Heat extremes pose substantial health risks during pregnancy and early childhood. High humidity exacerbates heat strain, but its long-term effects on health remain poorly understood. We compare the effect of prenatal exposure to extreme humid heat versus heat alone on child growth in South Asia, where high rates of child stunting meet rapidly accelerating hot-humid extremes. After adjusting for sociodemographic, seasonal, and spatial confounders, we use within-community variation in children’s ages to isolate the impact of prenatal exposures. We find that hot-humid exposures are much more detrimental to health than hot temperatures alone, with the potential to increase stunting in South Asia by over 3 million children by 2050. These findings underscore the importance of accounting for humidity when estimating and localizing climate change impacts.

Rising temperatures increase households’ demand for thermal comfort and, simultaneously, generate heat-related health harms that may translate into higher out-of-pocket medical spending. This paper studies how these two channels interact in household budgets, by framing air conditioning (AC) as an ex ante shielding technology that mitigates effective heat exposure, while health spending reflects an ex post coping margin once damages materialize. By using multiple waves (2014-2022) of the Italian HBS matched to ERA5 climate data, we estimate a two-stage discrete–continuous framework that: (i) characterizes the drivers of AC adoption

(extensive margin); (ii) quantifies how contemporaneous heat shocks affect electricity and health expenditures, and how these gradients are mediated by AC ownership (intensive margin). To address the endogeneity of AC, driven by unobserved thermal preferences, dwelling quality, and latent vulnerability, we implement a control-function strategy based on long-run climate and a novel set of instruments exploiting lagged regional tax credit uptake interacted with household constraints. We confirm that AC ownership increases with long-run heat exposure

and income, and is further shaped by age and job-related habits consistent with time-at-home and exposure differences. From the second stage, we find that AC owners exhibit a steeper electricity–heat response: a shock from 0 to 40 WBGCDDs increases electricity bills by about 14% (roughly C7) for AC owners—around 5 p.p. more than comparable non-owners.

On the health side, heat raises medical spending but the gradient is partially attenuated by AC: the same 40-degree-day shock is associated with roughly 17% higher health expenditures among non-AC owners versus 12% among AC owners, consistent with incomplete but meaningful shielding. Overall, this suggests that private cooling produces health-cost relief while shifting part of the heat burden onto electricity bills — an adaptation pathway with important distributional and energy-policy implications in a warming and aging country.

Food insecurity in low-income countries is typically analysed through agricultural production and purchasing power, with little attention paid to downstream food distribution. We study the welfare consequences of disruptions in final-stage food storage. Our identification exploits appliance breakdowns in Ghana, comparing households with functioning and broken refrigerators purchased at the same time and at similar prices. Breakdowns increase perceived food insecurity by one-third and reduce consumption of animal-sourced foods, lowering intake of vitamin B12. These findings highlight household refrigeration as an underappreciated lever to improve diets and reduce widespread micronutrient deficiencies as electrification rapidly expands.

A potential avenue for climate change impacts is damage to ecosystems relevant to human well-being. A prime example for such an ecosystem is the coral reef, which is both vulnerable to coral bleaching driven by climate change and provides resources for fisheries. Based on a novel large-scale coral bleaching dataset created using satellite imagery and relying on long-term sea surface temperatures as instruments, this paper analyzes whether coral bleaching impacts fish catch, household consumption and adaptation as well as child malnutrition in East Africa. Results confirm the hypothesized chain of consequences; coral bleaching significantly reduces fish catch, leads to a reduction in protein consumption and forces households to reduce assets. It furthermore causes exposed children to be too short for their age, which is an indicator for early childhood malnutrition. These results show that climate-induced coral bleaching presents a considerable threat to the economic well-being of coastal communities.

Our paper aims to investigate the causal impact of urban household water insecurity on incidences of waterborne diseases focusing on seven urban counties in Kenya. We hypothesised that household water insecurity increases incidences of waterborne diseases in Kenya. We exploited exogenous variation in historical variation in precipitation and drought to estimate the effect of household water insecurity increases on incidences of waterborne diseases. Our results find that household water insecurity substantially increases the probability of waterborne disease incidence. Policies that expand reliable and safe water access, especially for severely insecure households, can generate significant health gains. Addressing water insecurity should therefore be considered a central component of public health and human capital development strategies.

Keywords: Household water insecurity; Waterborne diseases; Control function approach; Endogeneity; Household health

JEL Codes: I12; I18; Q25; C36

Water scarcity is a major problem in rural Nigeria, forcing women to spend considerable time collecting water for their families. The water sector reforms supported by national funding and international donors have not been able to solve the problem of water scarcity, which forces rural communities to use rainwater collection systems. This research investigates the factors influencing rural women to adopt rainwater harvesting systems and evaluates how this practice affects their empowerment in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector. We collected primary data from 600 women from 30 rural communities through surveys conducted in Enugu and Anambra States. We developed a novel WASH Vulnerability Index (WVI), which is different from other WASH or empowerment indices. Previous indices focused on agency and or access, but WVI incorporates exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to express women’s vulnerability to water and sanitation elements in a compounded measure. We use Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to determine how rainwater harvesting systems adoption affects WASH vulnerability levels. The research demonstrates that rainwater harvesting systems decrease water scarcity exposure while improving households' ability to adapt to water shortages, mainly for families without private boreholes or public water supply access. The adoption of RWH depends heavily on three factors, which include credit availability, water usage satisfaction and current water security levels. The availability of water through RWH systems decreases the time women spend collecting water, yet they continue to face elevated risks from poor sanitation conditions. The research demonstrates that RWH operates as a budget-friendly, sustainable solution which enhances rural water security while empowering women in their communities. It is recommended that, RWH programs be implemented within national WASH strategies and that delivering community-based training programs, combining RWH with sanitation and hygiene initiatives, will be beneficial

This paper examines the dynamic impact of natural disasters on the individual acceptance of a physical form of intimate partner violence (IPV). Based on a global sample of individual survey data and historical geo-referenced records of natural disasters at a subnational level, we show that natural disasters have long-lasting effects on IPV acceptance, increasing it in the short- (0-4 years) and medium- (10-14 years) run. Furthermore, heterogeneity analyses reveal that lower-educated individuals are more affected than higher-educated individuals, men are more affected than women, and older cohorts are more affected than younger cohorts, while there are no differences in the effects of disasters on IPV attitudes between individuals with high and low incomes. Drawing on theories of IPV, we also uncover that likely mechanisms that may link disasters to the increased acceptance of IPV are psychological distress and economic insecurity fears.