Soil Aridification, Precipitations, and Infant Health: Evidence from Africa

Abstract

While research has studied the effects of climate variations on child nutrition, how soil aridification impacts child wellbeing is relatively understudied. Using climate and infant health data combined with an original measure of soil aridity, we show that infants born in arid areas are comparatively more likely to die under the age of 5 and be systematically underweight at birth. We also find that aridification deteriorates the positive association between rainfall and child health. Our findings emphasize the importance of accounting for aridity alongside precipitations when assessing the economic impact of climate.

Note:
Funding Information: The authors declare the study did not received any funding.

Conflict of Interests: The authors Jacopo Lunghi, Maurizio Malpede, and Marco Percoco declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Ethical Approval: The authors declare ethics approval was not required for this study as it exclusively utilized publicly available published or secondary data.

Keywords: Rainfall, climate change, potential evapotranspiration, child mortality, infant health