Arbeitsbereich

Bevölkerungsdynamik und Nachhaltiges Wohlbefinden

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Projekt

Impacts of Environmental Exposures on Cognitive Abilities and Educational Achievement

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Educational achievement is shaped not only by family background and institutional settings, but also by the environmental conditions in which children learn and develop. A growing body of evidence suggests that environmental exposures can impair cognitive functioning, reduce attention and learning capacity, and ultimately harm academic performance. As climate change intensifies, exposures such as extreme temperatures, air pollution, wildfire smoke, and allergens like pollen are becoming more frequent and severe, raising concerns about their cumulative impact on human capital formation. Crucially, children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds may be more vulnerable to these exposures due to differences in housing quality, school infrastructure, and existing health conditions, which could widen existing educational inequalities. Moreover, climate and environmental policies have the potential to improve learning conditions, but rigorous evaluations of their educational benefits remain scarce.

This project has three main aims. The first is to provide robust evidence on the causal effects of a broad range of environmental exposures on cognitive abilities and educational achievement, spanning air pollution, temperature, and, in ongoing and future analyses, wildfire smoke and pollen. The second is to examine whether and how these effects differ by family socioeconomic status. The third is to evaluate whether climate policies can reduce the inequalities that environmental exposures produce.

Our findings so far have shown that poor air quality in schools widens the gap in educational achievement between children from high and low socioeconomic status families in Italy, thus indicating that pollution exacerbates preexisting inequality (Bernardi & Conte Keivabu, 2024). Evidence from London demonstrates that the congestion charge improved air quality and school attendance, with larger benefits for disadvantaged pupils (Conte Keivabu & Rüttenauer, 2022). Our research from Madrid shows that a low emission zone improved academic performance, thus providing evidence that environmental policies can enhance air quality and educational outcomes (Valdés, Espadafor & Conte Keivabu, 2025). Regarding temperature, we have documented that heat and cold increase school absences in England, but that cold has a stronger impact in energy-poor neighborhoods (Conte Keivabu, 2024). Our work has also demonstrated that high temperatures can impair cognitive performance beyond the school setting, as an analysis of seven million parliamentary speeches across multiple countries shows that heat reduces speech complexity among politicians (Conte Keivabu & Widmann, 2024).

Future work will extend the analysis to environmental exposures that are increasingly due to climate change, but remain understudied in the educational context, particularly wildfire smoke and pollen. The project will continue to leverage fine-grained environmental and educational data alongside rigorous statistical methods to advance our understanding of how a changing climate shapes educational achievement and socioeconomic inequality.

Schlagworte:

Bildung und Wissenschaft, Gesundheitsversorgung, Public Health, Medizin und Epidemiologie, politische Maßnahmen, Politik, Verwaltung, Wohlfahrtsstaat

Schlagworte (Region):

Europa, Spanien, Welt