Early-Life Climate Exposures and Adult Fertility: Evidence from the Global Tropics

Zarmeen Salim , Pennsylvania State University
Brian Thiede, Pennsylvania State University
Clark Gray, University of North Carolina

Climate change is having significant social and economic effects. Most prior research has focused on contemporaneous impacts, but there are plausible reasons to expect climate exposures to have more persistent effects. The lifelong consequences of early-life shocks for individuals’ health and socioeconomic attainment have been well documented, but few studies consider the lifelong effect of climate anomalies on fertility. We examine the effects of early-life temperature and precipitation exposures for the number of children ever born to women ages 40-49 years in the global tropics. We measure the global effects of climatic anomalies from the prenatal year to age 4 on women’s parity across 26 countries. Our preliminary results show that exposure to heat shocks and droughts in childhood reduces later-life fertility. The full analyses will assess whether this relationship varies spatially and socially, and will compare the effects of early-life exposures to those of exposures in later childhood.

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 Presented in Session P80. Flash Session Environment, Human Capital and Inequalities