Weather and Death in India: Mechanisms and Implications of Climate Change

A key insight from recent research is that populations in developing countries will be those most affected by climate change, yet we have very limited concrete evidence on what form this impact will take or the magnitude of the population at risk.  This project aims to begin to fill this knowledge gap in the context of one important and potentially vulnerable country: India. 

Our focus in this project is on the links between weather fluctuations and mortality across the roughly 400 districts of India.  We use daily precipitation and temperature data from a dense network of meteorological stations for the period 1956-2006 to construct statistically-flexible, district-level measures of how far a given year’s weather deviates from district averages.  We find a large and statistically significant effect of these district-level climatic shock measures on district-level mortality (both infant and total).  Notably, the effect is entirely concentrated among the rural population of each district.  Furthermore, we find that the effects of temperature shocks are more severe than those of rainfall shocks, a result that has not been documented before (due to the difficulty of assembling temperature data). 

Our estimates can be thought of as the composite effect of climatic variation on mortality.  Conceptually, this composite effect can be sub-divided into two separate risk factors: (1) ‘direct’ effects, in which climatic fluctuations cause heat stress or an altered vector-borne disease environment; and (2), ‘indirect effects’, in which climatic fluctuations damage agricultural productivity, which causes real incomes to fall (due to higher food prices and lower agricultural incomes) and therefore the risk of malnutrition to rise. 

While it is difficult to assess the relative magnitude of these separate direct and indirect effects, the absence of a mortality response in urban India coupled with the extreme agricultural dependence of incomes in rural India is suggestive of important indirect effects linking climatic fluctuations to mortality via their effect on income.  We go on to pursue this possibility and focus in particular on the effect of climatic fluctuations on agricultural production, agricultural wages, food prices, and rural bank deposits/credits.  Our results suggest an important role for climatic fluctuations in determining the inter-annual variation in real incomes in rural India.  In ongoing work on this project we aim to identify various policies and institutional conditions (e.g. banks, health facilities and transportation infrastructure) that offer scope for mitigating the large effects of climatic fluctuations on mortality in India.