Mission critical: How climate change is reshaping health, governance, and poverty in developing countries
When Stanford King Center on Global Development Faculty Affiliate Amanda Kennard studied the effects of climate change on political mobilization in India, the results were striking: Unusually high temperatures reduced trust in political leaders and security forces and increased anti-incumbent voting and anti-government protests.
"Climate change has huge implications for governance – for states' abilities to meet the needs of citizens, for regimes to be able to maintain themselves," says Kennard, an assistant professor of political science. "This gets to the fabric of what's holding societies together and their ability to make collective decisions."
Based in part on the results of that forthcoming paper – and the difficulties in obtaining the data necessary to produce it – Kennard is now a principal investigator of the King Center's Climate Change and Political Mobilization in the Global South Initiative, which launched last year to explore how people and their leaders will respond to future climate shocks. The implications of the research are significant, especially for developing countries where governments may already struggle to meet the needs of their citizens.
Kennard is one of dozens of King Center researchers across the university – including undergraduates, graduate students, predoctoral fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty – who are studying not just the effects of climate change (on everything from wildfires and public health to seaweed farmers) but also policies that have the potential to mitigate or help people adapt to the effects of climate change. The work is central to the King Center's mission because climate change disproportionately affects people in low- and middle-income countries. By 2030, climate change could push an additional 132 million people into extreme poverty, with the majority living in low- and middle-income countries.
"Climate change poses a development crisis for low- and middle-income countries, demanding coordinated, multidisciplinary efforts to develop and scale effective solutions," says Katherine Casey, faculty director of the King Center and a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "At Stanford and the King Center, we are well positioned to spearhead these efforts, leveraging our broad expertise across campus to foster resilience and sustainable growth in the world's most vulnerable regions."
Does climate change challenge governance and societal stability?
Through the Climate Change and Political Mobilization in the Global South Initiative, Kennard and her co-principal investigators Sara Constantino, an assistant professor of environmental social sciences; and Brandon de la Cuesta, a King Center affiliated researcher and a research scientist at the Center for Food Security and the Environment, are using machine learning algorithms to harmonize existing public opinion and political behavior data from large-scale surveys such as Afrobarometer, Latinobarometer, and AmericasBarometer and combining that information with geolocated climate exposure data.
Eventually, the team plans to create an original survey instrument – the ClimateBarometer – that will be the first of its kind to provide detailed data on citizen climate beliefs and preferences across the Global South. Unlike most surveys, which query a sample of people who represent a country's demographic makeup, the ClimateBarometer will target communities that have been exposed to the mounting pressures of climate change in India, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Nigeria.
"If you are specifically interested in hearing from people who are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change or to the economic dislocation of decarbonization, you're not guaranteed to get that if you're balancing these standard demographic variables," Kennard says.
The survey responses will be useful for policymakers and governments, and, as Kennard says, there is also "a normative principle of giving voice to people who are less a part of the conversation."
In addition to allowing the initiative team to advance their own research, the comprehensive database will be publicly accessible, a boon for other scholars who want to study climate impacts, public opinion, and political behavior.
Kidanewold Demesie, a predoctoral research fellow with the King Center working on the initiative, says he reached out to Kennard when he was still an undergraduate to express his interest in joining the project.
"How will governments respond to certain climate shocks? How does that affect trust in governments and voting patterns in specific regions? These are things I'm really passionate about," he says.
The methodological challenges for the project have been huge. At first, the team, with help from research assistants in Global South countries, manually merged survey data. They have since turned to machine learning, building a "harmonization algorithm," that can assemble the data exponentially faster.
"The team essentially built a supercomputer to handle this data," says de la Cuesta. "It has unlocked for the average researcher a scale of analysis that was previously unattainable."
In a forthcoming paper the team describes the process as the "first fully-automated approach" to the problem of survey harmonization.
"In doing the India paper, that's when we learned how much work this was going to be," Kennard explains. "We wanted to build out a more streamlined system for us and for other users. The goal has always been to lower the barrier to entry for other political scientists to study climate change in the Global South."
What's actually working and who needs help? Guiding policymakers on effective climate adaptation
De la Cuesta is also working on another climate-related King Center initiative, co-led by Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Professor Marshall Burke: the Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change in the Global South Initiative.
The aim is to study policies that may help people adapt to the changing climate to provide policymakers with evidence as they pursue their own adaptation plans and priorities. Like Kennard's initiative, one output will be a publicly available database in which people can search for a specific kind of policy and see its effects on three critical outcomes in the relevant geographical area: economic growth and agricultural output, political stability and conflict, and public health.
De la Cuesta says the project emerged in part from Burke's conversations with economists who sometimes assume the market will automatically adapt to the challenges of climate change.
"Economists often take it for granted that we're adapting – 'the market will provide,'" de la Cuesta says. "But whether we're actually adapting is an empirical question, and it turns out the pace of adaptation has been really slow overall. Even in places where we have a lot of money and technology – even in Palo Alto itself, one of the wealthiest places in one of the wealthiest countries – it turns out we are not really adapting as well as we think we are."
To study the question, the team, including King Center predoctoral research fellow Arsene Nessono, is creating a dataset of thousands of past or current programs that had or have the potential to be climate protective – everything from small-scale cash transfers to nationwide social safety nets – and combining that with a global, high-resolution measure of local economic development.
"The goal is to build a single database and analyze a lot of these programs at the same time," de la Cuesta says.
So far, Nessono has been working with data on one of the nationwide programs, Bolsa Família in Brazil, which provides cash to low-income families and links them to certain social services such as employment training.
"We want to provide evidence for policymakers about what kind of adaptation projects they should invest in and to whom they should be targeted," Nessono says.
De la Cuesta says the work is critical, especially for developing countries that will be hit hardest by climate change.
"The world we're living in is the most optimistic projection of the world we're going to be living in," he says. "The question is: Whom do we help, how do we help, and who needs the most help?"
Pioneering work at the intersection of wildfire and disease
Another King Center researcher, Onja Davidson Raoelison, is taking a deep dive into the health consequences of one of the catastrophic effects of climate change: more intense and frequent wildfires in both the US and low- and middle-income countries.
A few weeks after this year's devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, Raoelison traveled to several sites around the city to take air, water, and soil samples as part of her research into the health impacts of wildfires.
The Pacific Coast Highway was closed to travelers, but Raoelison was able to access the area in part because of a letter from Stanford King Center on Global Development Executive Director Jessica Leino describing Raoelison's research.
Armed with a shovel, a cooler, some beakers, and a portable air quality instrument, among other equipment, Raoelison measured the particulate matter (PM2.5) in the air and collected samples from the ocean, nearby waterways, and wildfire-affected soils. After a week in the area, she returned to Stanford where she is a postdoctoral fellow at the King Center and is studying the impacts of wildfires on infectious disease, among other topics.
Raoelison knows her work will only become more relevant as wildfires intensify in frequency and duration because of the effects of climate change. In addition to her fieldwork in Los Angeles, she is working on an epidemiological study based on wildfire and health data from Brazil, and she plans to apply lessons and techniques developed through her work with the LA fires to conduct research in other low- and middle-income countries as well, including Madagascar, where she was born.
"There are so many risks associated with wildfires," she explains. "People with immunodeficiencies–which are more common in lower income settings–are going to be a lot more likely to develop disease if they are exposed to wildfires. We're talking about human health."
King Center Faculty Affiliate Jason Andrews, an associate professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, says Raoelison's research background, including as an environmental engineer with training in microbiology, is crucial to her new focus on infectious disease epidemiology.
"This kind of interdisciplinary approach is critical to gaining insights into the interactions of complex systems such as climate and infectious disease dynamics," he says. "With her skills, she will be uniquely posed to probe these relationships as well as identify solutions to mitigate them."
Tackling climate change: from seaweed farming and irrigation to peatlands and energy access
King Center work touches on a wide variety of environmental and climate change-related topics. Faculty Affiliate Alison Hoyt, an assistant professor of earth system science at the Doerr School of Sustainability, coauthored a forthcoming paper documenting peatlands in Colombia that might store up to 10 times the carbon of a non-peatland Amazonian forest.
A forthcoming paper from a near-completed King Center project, the Extreme Poverty, Infrastructure, and Climate (EPIC) initiative, aims to shed light on how infrastructure investments – and particularly small-scale irrigation projects – can alleviate poverty. The research focuses on the impacts of irrigation infrastructure in Ethiopia.
"There's a lot of investment from governments and organizations like the World Bank into small-scale irrigation projects," says Christine Pu, MS '20, PhD '24, who worked on the infrastructure project with faculty leads Doerr School of Sustainability Professors Jenna Davis and Eric Lambin. "The thinking is, this is a really promising way to climate-proof livelihoods in emerging markets. We're looking at, to what extent is this true, who's benefiting, and what are the policy differences that matter."
Under the direction of King Center Faculty Affiliate David Cohen, undergraduate student Kaylee Shen, an earth systems major, is studying Indonesian seaweed farming, which, like many industries, is threatened by pollution and global warming. Indonesian seaweed is mainly a commodity crop, harvested as a source of carrageenan, which is an additive used in products ranging from toothpaste to ice cream.
"The work highlights the far-reaching effects of climate change," she says. "It's truly impacting just about every industry and supply chain in existence."
Two graduate students supported by the King Center working with Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Professor Sally Benson are exploring electricity in developing countries: Oluchi Obinegbo, a PhD student in engineering, is studying how to maximize the benefits of energy interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa in a participatory way that accounts for the needs of local communities; Dhruv Suri, another PhD student studying energy resources engineering, is working on a project to enhance the digital infrastructure of legacy electricity grids in developing countries so that expansion – of transmission and capacity – can be optimized for cost and social welfare.
Health care, education, and economic development all depend on reliable energy, yet, according to Benson, nearly one billion people still lack electricity and more than three billion don't have adequate energy.
Her students' projects are important because, in the rush to decarbonize, some people who have never had electricity access are being left behind, yet again.
"Understanding what people really need, what people really want, and aligning that with what is provided is really important," Benson says. "If our goal is to provide energy access and solve the climate problem, then what's the pathway to the most affordable, most low-emission portfolio of energy technologies that will meet people's basic needs for continued economic development?"
For the King Center, supporting a variety of work – by new and established scholars, with seed grants and longer-term funding – is the surest way to ensure that the best solutions to the problems of climate change emerge.
"As climate change intensifies, its effects on health, markets, governance, and poverty are becoming more pronounced, and being felt especially hard in low- and middle-income countries," Casey says. "Research supported by the King Center – on safety nets, adaptation programs, and energy transitions – is shedding light on both the challenges and potential solutions to the mounting crisis."
