Climate change, environmental shocks, and fertility: Global evidence from low- and middle-income countries

Côme Cheritel, Paris School of Economics
Roman Hoffmann, Wittgenstein Centre - IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU
Raya Muttarak, University of Bologna

Climate change affects communities worldwide with implications for livelihoods, human security, and health and well-being. These can also have impacts on reproductive behaviors and fertility which have not been comprehensively understood at the global level. Building on detailed Demographic and Health Survey data, we provide comparative evidence on the impacts of climatic shocks on fertility patterns worldwide at the subnational level. Our longitudinal database (1980 to 2015) covers monthly fertility levels for 590 regions in 65 countries, representing 3.8 billion individuals in 2020. Combining the population data with high-resolution climate data on temperature and precipitation anomalies, we find a nuanced impact of climatic factors on fertility. Temperature anomalies immediately before or after the conception are found to significantly reduce fertility as do temperature shocks occurring shortly before the prospective birth dates. Women in less developed regions and with lower education levels are particularly affected by these changes, suggesting major inequalities in the impacts of climate change on global fertility. Positive precipitation shocks, on the other hand, increase fertility levels in our data. Our results furthermore point to the existence of rebound effects with increases in fertility in the years after the occurrence of a shock, suggesting complex temporal dynamics.

Keywords: Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Fertility, Data and Methods, Geo-referenced/geo-coded data

See extended abstract.