This study estimates the effect of climate change on contraceptive use in a global context. We link women’s monthly contraceptive calendar data from the Demographic and Health Surveys in 44 low- and middle-income countries with high resolution daily temperature data, exploiting the random component of local temperature deviations to causally estimate this effect. We find that high temperatures impact contraceptive use, driven by changes in short-acting reversible contraception. However, these impacts are region-specific: while temperature shocks reduce contraceptive use in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, they increase in South and Southeast Asia. We find clear heterogeneities by education, age, parity, and urban/rural status. Our estimates imply that temperature-related climate change in sub-Saharan Africa – the most impacted region – will reduce contraceptive use by 2.4-4.3 percent by 2100. We conclude that the disproportionate worsening of climatic conditions in low- and middle-income countries will exacerbate already-existing global disparities in contraceptive access and use.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.