The Costs of Climate Change: The Effect of Rising Temperatures on Children’s Nutritional Status in India
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2025-07-07
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en
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This thesis investigated whether rising temperatures affect children’s nutritional status in India negatively, in order to examine whether the increasing temperatures (Mourougan et al., 2024) and the prevalence of child malnutrition (Das et al., 2021; Tripathi et al., 2023) in this developing country are related. Existing literature indicates that increasing temperatures influence (children’s) health and nutritional status negatively through multiple channels (e.g. Bharambe et al., 2023; Biswas et al., 2024; Ebi & Paulson, 2007; Motarjemi et al., 1993). Nutritional status is measured by weight-for-age Z scores (WAZ), which is also used to examine how rising temperatures affect the probability of children being underweight (WAZ <-2). WAZ and other health-related data from NFHS-4 and NFHS-5 are combined with weather data (e.g. daily temperatures) from ERA5, and create a district-wave panel with 467 districts in total across the two waves. A binned temperature approach is utilized, where bin 4 (24-28°C) is used as the reference group, and heterogeneity analyses are performed as well. However, the findings do not align with expectations based on existing literature. Therefore, the null hypothesis, which states that rising temperatures negatively affect children’s nutritional status in India, cannot be rejected.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen