Climate and fertility amid a public health crisis

Abstract

One line of enquiry in demographic research assesses whether climate affects fertility. We extend this literature by examining the ramifications of climate conditions on fertility over a period of public health crisis in a highly unequal, urban middle-income country. We use monthly data for Brazil's 5,564 municipalities and apply spatial fixed-effects models to account for unobserved municipal heterogeneity and spatial dependence. Findings suggest that increases in temperature and precipitation are associated with declines in births. We also show that changes in response to climate conditions became greater during the Zika epidemic, particularly in urban areas. Combined, findings highlight the value of understanding the intersections between climate and fertility across geographic boundaries and during this public health crisis. Epidemics have become more important in people's lives with the recurring emergence of novel infectious disease threats, such as Zika and Covid-19.

Keywords:

• births
• fertility
• epidemics
• temperature
• precipitation
• Zika
• Brazil
• low- and middle-income countries
• Latin America
• spatial fixed-effects models

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Please direct all correspondence to Letícia J. Marteleto, University of Pennsylvania, Population Studies Center & Department of Sociology, 3718 Locust Walk, McNeil Building, Ste. 230, Philadelphia, PA 19104–6299, USA; or by Email: [email protected]

2 Funding: This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under Grant number R01HD091257 awarded to Principal Investigator L. Marteleto; and under Grant number P2CHD042849 awarded to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the first author’s institution at the time of writing the paper.

3 Acknowledgements: This study was conducted under Institutional Review Board approval number 2018–01–0055 from the University of Texas at Austin and the Brazilian National Commission for Research Ethics (also known as Comissão Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa (CONEP)) study approval CAAE: 34032920.1.0000.5149. We thank the editor of Population Studies and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

4 Cristina Guimarães Rodrigues can be found on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristina-guimar%C3%A3es-23b7a056/