1 October 2025, 15:15 CET
Seminar Room 1.103
Esther Heesemann
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Wealth status, gender, and age are widely acknowledged to influence a person’s vulnerability to climate stressors. However, there is a lack of multicounty evidence to quantify the magnitude and nature of these differences, particularly in rural areas. Using household survey data from 24 countries combined with georeferenced temperature and precipitation data, we estimate the differential effects of extreme precipitation, extreme heat, and long-run temperature changes on the total, on-farm, and off-farm incomes of poor households, households headed by women and younger people in rural areas, relative to their comparison groups. We show that in an average year poor households and those headed by women lose between 2.9 and 7.5 percent more of their total incomes, relative to non-poor and male-headed households, due to extreme heat and precipitation. Conversely, households headed by younger people manage to increase their total incomes relative to households headed by older people when extreme events occur through relative increases in offfarm income. Moreover, we show that a 1-degree C increase in long run average temperatures compels poor rural households to rely more heavily on agricultural income sources, compared to non-poor households, while female headed households lose 34 percent more of their income relative to male-headed households. We conclude that vulnerabilities to climate stressors in rural areas are diverse and distinct, and that addressing these disparities is essential for achieving our collective ambition to reduce global poverty.
Antonio Scognamillo
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
This study investigates how persistent climate shocks impact child malnutrition in rural Nepal, a high-risk Himalayan nation with preexisting malnutrition, particularly among children under 5. Using three waves of the Nepal Rural Household Risk and Vulnerability Survey (2016-2018) and geospatial climate data to compute shock incidence rate based on Standardized PrecipitationEvapotranspiration Index (SPEI), this study quantifies the effect of persistent shock on acute malnutrition, and potential pathways. Findings indicate that persistent shocks over the past five years significantly worsen wasting, with anomalous dry condition being 2-4 times more deleterious. Shocks during the agricultural season amplifies the risk, while other determinants like higher income, public infrastructure (drinking water) and remittances help mitigate wasting. The effect of shocks varies across sociodemographic groups (ethnicity, gender, education, total child), and adopting agricultural technology and community engagement are effective in reducing the impact of climate on wasting. Likewise, male children are more vulnerable to shocks compared to their female counterparts, though both genders are impacted in multi-child households. This underscores the need for strategic interventions based on the timing and nature of climatic shocks. The paper contributes to the literature on climate shocks and child nutrition, stressing the importance of targeted policy intervention in vulnerable regions like Nepal.
Neil Ferguson
ISDC - International Security and Development Center
Climate change poses an increasing threat to development and peace. High temperatures and other shocks have been linked to escalations in conflict and concerns are raised that increasing temperatures could drive future spirals of violence. While it is tempting to think such shocks also undermine non-violent efforts towards conflict resolution, theory around transitions out of conflict paint a different picture. Escalating violence is a predictor of the end of conflict, both via military and peaceful means. Higher violence could increase the “hurting” of a stalemate, encouraging negotiation and mediation processes or draw the attention of the international community, encouraging action. This opens the potential that climate shocks might have unexpected impacts on peace events, despite escalating violence seeming antithetical to peace in most senses. In this article, we test the impact of the exogenous onset of El Niño and La Niña years on the number of on-going peace events. We show that El Niño is correlated with an increased number of on-going peace processes and La Niña with a reduction in the number of processes. Mediation analyses show that these effects are not driven, solely, by escalating violence. This suggests that climate shocks play a very different role in the determination of peace events, like negotiations and mediations, than they do on driving violence. They also suggest that while escalating conflict in a warming world is a key risk, it does not fatally undermine efforts to resolve these conflicts peacefully.