PIRE: Climate risk, pollution, and childhood inequalities in low- and middle-income countries

Concern is rapidly increasing about accelerating climate changes and their implications for the health and welfare of children. In a recent press release, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that approximately one billion children are at extremely high risk of experiencing impacts of the climate crisis; many will experience multiple climate shocks combined with poor essential services such as water, sanitation and healthcare.

At the same time, while air pollution is decreasing in many high-income countries and some middle-income countries, it remains very high in large areas of low- and middle-income countries in which the majority of the world’s children reside. Children from poorer countries and from economically and socially marginalized groups within countries may be particularly vulnerable to climatic and environmental hazards.

To date, there has not been a global study of the degree to which the ill effects of extreme climate and air pollution exposures are borne differently by children according to individual, family, and overall country characteristics. Focusing on low- and middle-income countries, this project advances and disseminates scientific knowledge about how global childhood inequalities condition both the risks of experiencing climate hazards and extreme air pollution and the implications, once exposed.

Project partners include faculty members and students at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Houston and researchers at the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Regional Institute for Population Studies in Ghana, UNICEF, and the World Bank. These research partnerships will inform analyses and provide direct support for dissemination of findings to stakeholders in a position to support interventions or advise on policy.

In addition, these collaborations will provide global engagement and training opportunities to a diverse group of students and emerging scholars.

This project establishes university-international agency collaborations to investigate how global childhood inequalities condition risks of climatic and environmental hazards exposure; implications, once exposed; and capacity to buffer ill effects. These collaborations will facilitate data-sharing, collaborative analysis, feedback between academic researchers and the policy community, and training for future generations of interdisciplinary population scientists.

The project team will link population, environmental, and climate hazard data and consider possible differences across groups defined by household, community, and country socioeconomic status (SES), demographic group, gender, and health/nutrition status. We will apply novel group-based climate/environmental measures to investigate the distributional patterns of ambient risks among intersecting regional and sociodemographic groups.

In addition, the team will adopt statistical and machine learning techniques to investigate the heterogeneous effects of climate/environmental risks along the full distribution of child human capital outcomes given observed SES and demographic characteristics. Finally, the team will develop accessible data portals that will provide policy makers, researchers, and interested citizens with frequently updated and real-time global and regional maps of changing patterns of inequalities along the environment, population, and human capital axes across time and space.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.