Arbeitsbereich

Bevölkerungsdynamik und Nachhaltiges Wohlbefinden

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Projekt

Implications of Climate Change for Fetal Health and Fertility

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Demography has long studied how environmental conditions shape mortality and health, yet the effects of environmental conditions on birth outcomes, and particularly on fertility, have received far less attention. Climate-related stressors such as heat can disrupt conception, compromise pregnancies, and worsen neonatal health, but evidence on which populations are most affected, how different exposures operate at different stages of the reproductive process, and how institutional and climatic contexts shape vulnerability remains limited. Additionally, environmental exposures such as wildfires remain understudied.

This project investigates two themes. First, it examines how environmental exposures during pregnancy affect birth weight and neonatal health, with particular attention being given to how these effects differ across sociodemographic groups. Second, it examines how climate-related stressors affect fertility, including their impact on seasonal patterns of birth rates and gestational duration and the timing and mode of delivery, to better understand how environmental change operates across the reproductive timeline.

Our findings on birth outcomes showed that in utero exposure to extreme heat worsens neonatal health and that these effects fall disproportionately on socioeconomically disadvantaged families, thus underlining how climate-related health risks are unequally distributed from the very start of life (Conte Keivabu and Cozzani, 2022). On fertility, we analyzed birth seasonality in East and West Germany across seven decades, revealing how institutional factors shape the seasonality of births (Conte Keivabu, 2025). We also demonstrated that high temperatures suppress conceptions in Spain, with effects that do not vary across sociodemographic groups (Conte Keivabu, Cozzani, and Wilde, 2024). Finally, we found that maternal exposure to wildfire proximity and wildfire smoke affects birth outcomes in Spain, but with no major inequalities observed by sociodemographic characteristics (Conte Keivabu and Rubio-Cabañez, 2026).

Ongoing work exploits daily birth records to examine how heat and wildfires affect the timing and mode of delivery, capturing short-term displacement effects that aggregated data cannot detect. Overall, novel data linkages and causal inference methods enable us to produce a comprehensive account of how a changing climate affects human reproduction, and to generate evidence that informs targeted public health and adaptation responses.

Schlagworte:

Demografischer Wandel, Geburtenentwicklung, Gesundheitsversorgung, Public Health, Medizin und Epidemiologie

Schlagworte (Region):

Europa, Vereinigte Staaten, Welt