The Short and Medium-Term Effects of Climate Change on Vulnerable Households with Dispersed Family Networks: Evidence from Kenya

Kenneth Leonard, University of Maryland College Park
Keehoon Jung, University of Maryland, College Park
Sangeetha Madhavan, University of Maryland
Blessing Mberu, African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC)
Peter Sifuna, Kenya Medical Research Institute

Weather has well-known impacts on agricultural yields, and climate change significantly increases the variability of productivity from year to year. Even as farmers adapt to changing conditions, this increase in variability is likely to be one of the constant impacts of climate change. Migration and marriage are often used to mitigate the risk, particularly in countries without the insurance and commodities exchanges that would stabilize rural economies. However, as climate change expands the risks, these same networks mean that the suffering of poor weather events is spread further than policymakers often recognize. We trace the impact of agricultural yields through networks by looking at child anthropometrics and household food insecurity in data from urban Kenya. We show that children and households suffer from events in distant parts of Kenya because they have kin who live there, highlighting interconnectedness in the context of climate change. We show that agricultural yields in rural areas affect household food insecurity in Nairobi up to five years later. However, weight for age and height for age show only contemporaneous effects; children are worse off if the crops do poorly in that year but are not affected by yields in the years before.

Keywords: Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Social network methods, Children, Adolescents, and Youth

See extended abstract.