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Mental health disorders are a substantial portion of the global disease burden, yet their determinants are understudied, particularly in developing countries. We find that temperature shocks in utero increase depressive symptoms in adulthood in Africa. A ten percent increase in heat exposure increases our depression indices .05 to .07 standard deviations. We find no evidence that the effects of these shocks are smaller for more recent birth cohorts, nor do shocks predict greater treatment of depressive symptoms. Temperature fluctuations, increasingly frequent due to climate change, worsen the mental health disease burden and health care systems in Africa do not mitigate these impacts.

We study the adoption of energy-efficient LED lighting in garment factories around Bangalore, India. Combining daily production line–level data with weather data, we estimate a negative, nonlinear productivity-temperature gradient. We find that LED lighting raises productivity on hot days. Using the firm's costs data, we estimate that the payback period for LED adoption is less than one-third the length after accounting for productivity co-benefits. The average factory in our data gains about $2,880 in power consumption savings and about $7,500 in productivity gains.

Smallholder agricultural commodity suppliers in developing countries are often vulnerable to global commodity price fluctuations. Using panel data on farmers from an area of Tanzania where most farmers grow coffee, this study finds that global coffee prices matter for household outcomes, through their effects on farmgate prices, coffee sales and revenues, and household expenditures. The article documents that households cope with coffee price busts by increasing enterprise ownership, an effect that is greater for households without access to other means of coping. Comparisons of mean outcomes of enterprises operated by coper households (which operated an enterprise only in periods of low coffee price) with those of stayer households (which operated an enterprise throughout the sample period) indicate that the former are less likely to be profitable or to hire workers.

The role of cultural distance in market integration, particularly in the developing world, has received relatively little attention. Using prices from more than 200 South Asian markets spanning 1861 to 1921, we show that linguistic distance correlates negatively with market integration. A one-standard-deviation increase in linguistic distance predicts a reduction in the price correlation between two markets of 0.121 standard deviations for wheat, 0.181 for salt, and 0.088 for rice. While factors like genetic distance, literacy gaps, and railway connections are correlated with linguistic distance, they do not fully explain the correlation between linguistic distance and market integration.

Water is a necessity for the survival of all living beings. Even though 71% of the Earth’s surface is water, there is still an acute shortage of potable water in many countries, as approximately 97.5% of Earth’s water is saltwater in the oceans and only 2.5% is freshwater in groundwater, lakes, and rivers. Thus, access to clean drinking water is a major issue that needs to be tackled immediately and efficiently. Currently, existing technologies for water purification such as multistage flash, multiple effect, vapor compression, reverse osmosis (RO), ion exchange, electrodialysis, and capacitive deionization (CDI) require a lot of energy, leading to environmental pollution caused by the consumption of fossil fuels. It is also found that 70% of water supplied as input to these technologies is wasted, while methods such as RO remove important minerals, and hence, World Health Organization (WHO) standards do not deem this fit. The desalination of saline water using solar stills is an effective solution to overcome these problems. Solar energy is abundant, everlasting, economical and does not cause emission of greenhouse gases. Combining this worldwide availability and inexhaustible nature of solar energy with a desalination process, a water purification system is designed and operated. This paper proposes the design and application of a water purification system which will be beneficial for localities such as residential buildings and bungalows in densely populated cities where the rise in energy consumption has led to an increase in the carbon footprint, reduction in electric power supply, and higher energy costs along with the depletion of fossil fuels and other exhaustible energy sources. This design can be further modified and installed in arid regions and villages where grid electricity is not a feasible option to meet energy demands and water scarcity is prevalent.

Water is eminent for all living beings and is a basic requirement. Even though 71% of the Earth’s surface is water-covered, there is still an acute shortage of drinking water in many countries, as approximately 97.5% of Earth’s water is saltwater in the oceans and only 2.5% is fresh water in groundwater, lakes, and rivers. Thus, access to clean drinking water is a major issue that needs to be tackled immediately and efficiently. The existing water purification technologies like reverse osmosis (RO), electrodialysis, multistage flash, multiple effect, and vapor compression require a lot of energy and fuels, leading to environmental pollution. It is also found that 70% of water supplied as input to these technologies is wasted, while RO also removes important minerals, and World Health Organization (WHO) standards do not deem this fit. The desalination of saline water using solar stills is an effective solution to overcome these problems. Combining the worldwide availability and inexhaustible nature of solar energy, a still that requires only solar energy as the input ensures a sustainable and environmentally friendly method to produce potable water with minimal energy conversions. This paper reviews the performance of a solar still by varying parameters that affect the production of output distillate. The results obtained are studied and presented.

The allocation of decision rights within organizations influences resource allocation, expansion decisions, and ultimately outcomes. Using a newly constructed dataset, I estimate the effects of an earned autonomy program for State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in India. The program gave managers (the board of directors) of profitable SOEs more autonomy over strategic decisions such as capital expansion and the formation of joint ventures. I find that autonomy allows SOEs to increase their capital stock and form more strategic partnerships which leads to greater sales and profits. I also find that the likelihood that a manager subsequently joins a board of a private firm is greater for managers of those SOEs which were granted autonomy, indicating that career concerns is a consistent explanation for these managerial decisions. Taken together, these results indicate that large gains in SOE performance are possible without privatization (by policies like earned autonomy) and may occur partly through managers' career concerns.

We study how managers mitigate the negative impacts of environmental shocks. Pairing productivity data from a garment firm with granular measures of air pollution, we show that productivity suffers...

We use a difference in differences approach to show that the adoption of High Yielding Varieties (HYV) reduced infant mortality in India. This holds even comparing children of the same mother. The effects of HVY adoption on mortality are larger for rural children, boys, and low-caste children. While we are not able to explore mechanisms in depth, our evidence points to a limited role played by increased investments in early childhood health or selection into childbearing in response to HYV adoption.\ud \ud

We evaluate the causal impacts of on-the-job soft skills training on the productivity, wages, and retention of female garment workers in India. The program increased women’s extraversion and communication, and spurred technical skill upgrading. Treated workers were 20 percent more productive than controls post-program. Wages rise very modestly with treatment (by 0.5 percent), with no differential turnover, suggesting that although soft skills raise workers’ marginal products, labor market frictions are large enough to create a substantial wedge between productivity and wages. Consistent with this, the net return to the firm was large: 258 percent eight months after program completion.

This study predicts the impact of climate change on African agriculture. We use a generalized linear model (GLM) framework to estimate the relationship between the proportion of various Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZs) in a district and climate. Using three climate scenarios, we project how climate change will cause AEZs to shift, causing changes in acreage and net revenue per hectare of cropland. Our results predict that Africa will suffer heavy annual welfare losses by 2070–2100, ranging between US$14 billion and US$70 billion, depending on the climate scenario and cropland measure considered.

Although there is now an extensive literature on the economic impacts of climate change on agriculture, no study has yet addressed the endogeneity of irrigation. This paper examines how climate affects the choice to irrigate and the conditional income earned by each farmer. The paper develops a selection model of irrigation choice and conditional income. Using data from farmers across eleven African countries, the paper demonstrates that the choice of irrigation is sensitive to both temperature and precipitation. Rainfed and irrigated farm income also both respond to climate but have different climate sensitivity. Impact models that fail to account for endogenous irrigation are biased.

African societies exported more slaves in colder years. Lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields, lowering slave supply costs. Our results help explain African participation in the slave trade, which predicts adverse outcomes today. We use an annual panel of African temperatures and port-level slave exports to show that exports declined when local temperatures were warmer than normal. This result is strongest where African ecosystems are least resilient to climate change. Cold weather shocks at the peak of the slave trade predict lower economic activity today. We support our interpretation using the histories of Whydah, Benguela, and Mozambique.\ud \ud

A large fraction of modern global conflicts has occurred in Africa, resulting in a disproportionate number of fatalities compared to other regions. Many of Africa's conflicts have deep historical roots. In this paper, we contribute to understanding the determinants of historical African conflict by studying an important historical source of conflict: suppression of the slave trade after 1807. We use geo-coded data on African conflicts to uncover a discontinuous increase in conflict after 1807 in areas affected by the slave trade, indicating that suppression increased the incidence of conflict between Africans. In West Africa, the slave trade declined. This empowered interests that rivaled existing authorities, and political leaders resorted to violence in order to maintain their influence. In West-Central and South-East Africa, slave exports increased after 1807 and were produced through violence.\ud \ud

One important element of the climate change mitigation discussions is the role of forests and specifically the internationally-agreed activities for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation while promoting conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancing forest carbon stocks (REDD ). REDD encapsulates many of the challenges and opportunities for addressing climate change and the need for increasing expertise in order to do so. For REDD programmes to be successfully devised in countries, technical understanding is needed on carbon accounting, national forest inventories, spatial planning and biodiversity. In addition, there is a need for addressing environmental governance, cross-sectorial policies and legal reforms, and stakeholder participation. Some elements are very specific to REDD such as the social and environmental safeguards outlined in the UNFCCC Cancun Agreements (2010), and the Warsaw Framework for REDD implementation (2013), while others are about a larger paradigm shift in national development strategies, which is not limited to REDD or forests but rather address issues related to the transition to an inclusive Green Economy. This sourcebook is designed to give an overview of the key topics related to forests and climate change, under the overarching and evolving REDD narrative; with the purpose of facilitating the integration of this new knowledge domain into academic programmes. The sourcebook provides detailed references for further study in each module, and can be used comprehensively or with a focus on a specific topic of interest or relevance for the course of study. From a pedagogical point of view, Forests in a Changing Climate is aimed at university professors and graduate students from different academic disciplines (forestry, public policy, environmental science, economics, etc.) interested in teaching a course or conducting a lecture on REDD. The content of the book is largely based on the knowledge generated by the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD Programme). Members of UNEP’s Global Universities Partnership on Environment and Sustainability (GUPES), especially those working on forests and environment, are encouraged to use the sourcebook and provide feedback. Although the sourcebook is primarily for academia, the text will also be a very useful resource for policy makers and practitioners in the environment and forestry sectors, who seek to gain a deeper knowledge of REDD. Engaging academia and training the next generation of experts is crucial in order to ensure that the world’s best efforts are directed at solving the climate change crisis. We hope that this sourcebook will increase knowledge of REDD, a tremendous opportunity to conserve and manage the world’s forests for all their values while also providing much needed climate change mitigation.