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Temperature and Precipitation Effects on Birth Rates in Sub-Saharan Africa

Previous literature on climate change and human population dynamics has mainly focused on how population growth affects greenhouse gas emissions. Much less research has analyzed how climatic variability influences the size of human populations, despite reasonable expectations of such effects. Evidence of climate-fertility linkages, or lack thereof, is needed to refine understandings of adaptive behaviors. It is also needed to refine models of the demographic drivers of greenhouse gas emissions, which tend to assume climatic changes will not feedback to impact population dynamics. We test this relationship using birth histories from 23 sub-Saharan African countries and high-resolution climate data. Our analyses show that exposure to climatic variability is associated with fertility in sub-Saharan Africa, albeit in complex ways. Women exposed to hot-and-dry spells experience significant reductions in the annual probability of fertility, while exposure to above-average temperatures and precipitation is associated with increased fertility over baseline. These associations vary between demographic and geographic groups, revealing important differences in vulnerability and adaptive behavior.