ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2020
Stunted from the start: Early life weather conditions and child undernutrition in Ethiopia.
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 107 citations in OpenAlex.
- High ambient temperature effects on the anthropometric status of the population: A systematic review and meta-analysis.PloS one · 2026Pooled it
- The Effect of Rainfall and Temperature Patterns on Childhood Linear Growth in the Tropics: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Pooled it
- Impacts of heat exposure in utero on long-term health and social outcomes: a systematic review.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2024Pooled it
- The Association Between Heat Stress and Child Stunting, Wasting, and Underweight Under Varying Vegetation Covers in Ethiopia.Maternal & child nutrition · 2026Article
- Intersection of Climate and Environmental Change and Priority Health Outcomes Across the Life Course: Working Group 1 Report from the "Agriculture and Diet: Value Added for Nutrition, Translation, and Adaptation in a Global Ecology" (ADVANTAGE) Project.Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Review
- Exploring the Effects of Climate Change on Child Malnutrition: A Scoping Review.Journal of human nutrition and dietetics : the official journal of the British Dietetic Association · 2026Article
- Using data science to identify climate change and health adverse impacts and solutions in Africa: a scoping review.npj health systems · 2026Article
- Ambient temperature, rainfall, and adverse maternal and child health outcomes in Nigeria: evidence from a national cross-sectional study.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Cash transfers relax climate-induced mobility constraints in Kenya.Population and environment · 2026Article
- Does humidity matter? Prenatal heat and child health in South Asia.Science advances · 2025Article
- Impact of prenatal drought exposures on under-5 childhood stunting in 32 low-and-middle-income countries: a global analysis using demographic and health survey.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2025Article
- The joint effects of prenatal exposure to PMJournal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · 2025Article
- Temperature and precipitation affect the water fetching time burden in Sub-Saharan Africa.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Precipitation, temperature, and child undernutrition: evidence from the Mali demographic and health surveys 2012-2013 and 2018.Journal of health, population, and nutrition · 2025Article
- The relationship between prenatal heat exposure and birth outcomes: How much does the heat metric matter?PloS one · 2025Article
- Prevalence and determinants of stunting and anaemia in children aged 6-23 months: A multilevel analysis from rural Ethiopia.Maternal & child nutrition · 2025Article
- Climatic change and household-level demographic dynamics: concepts and empirical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa.Population and environment · 2024Article
- Early-life air pollution and green space exposures as determinants of stunting among children under age five in Sub-Saharan Africa.Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · 2024Article
- Predicting the short and long term effects of food price inflation, armed conflicts, and climate variability on global acute malnutrition in Somalia.Journal of health, population, and nutrition · 2024Article
- Severe drought exposure in utero associates to children's epigenetic age acceleration in a global climate change hot spot.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between weather conditions and child nutrition in Ethiopia. We link data from four rounds of the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey to high-resolution climate data to measure exposure to rainfall and temperature in utero and during early life. We then estimate a set of multivariate regression models to understand how weather conditions impact child stunting, an indicator of sustained early life undernutrition. We find that greater rainfall during the rainy seasons in early life is associated with greater height for age. In addition, higher temperatures in utero, particularly during the first and third trimesters, and more rainfall during the third trimester, are positively associated with severe stunting, though stunting decreases with temperature in early life. We find potential evidence for a number of pathways underlying the weather-child nutrition relationship including agricultural livelihoods, heat stress, infectious disease transmission, and women's time use during pregnancy. These findings illuminate the complex pathways through which climate change may influence child health and should motivate additional research focused on identifying the causal mechanisms underlying these links.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.