Climate Change & Education Inequity Seminar
Location
On Campus
Date & Time
March 28, 2018, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Description
GES seminar on Wednesday, March 28 at noon in Sondheim 001, the CART lab with Heather Randell, a postdoctoral researcher at SESYNC. Heather is an environmental sociologist and demographer who is interested in multiple aspects of environmental change.
You can learn more about Heather's research here: <www.heatherrandell.com>.
Her findings suggest that climate change could undermine gains in socioeconomic development, particularly among the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Climate change may negatively impact education among children via exposure to extreme temperature and precipitation conditions. In order to understand this relationship, I link longitudinal socioeconomic, demographic, and schooling data from rural Ethiopia to high-resolution gridded climate data to measure exposure to climatic conditions relative to historical norms.
Results indicate that more favorable early life temperatures are associated with an increased likelihood of a child having completed any education, and that greater summer rainfall during both early life and school ages is associated with attending school at the time of the survey. In order to understand how this relationship varies over space as well as between populations, a new paper investigates the impact of climatic conditions on educational attainment in 29 countries across the global tropics.
I find that exposure to higher-than-average temperatures is associated with fewer years of schooling across the tropics, and that children from the most educated households tend to experience the greatest educational penalties when exposed to unfavorable climatic conditions. These findings suggest that climate change could undermine gains in socioeconomic development, particularly among the world’s most vulnerable populations.