Jere Richard Behrman

The frequency and intensity of heat waves are increasing, but how these trends translate to changes in the ambient heat to which children are potentially exposed (hereafter, exposures) is not well established. One complicating factor is that it is not only extreme temperatures that change over time, but also the geospatial distribution of children. Another limitation in our understanding is that existing studies often summarize exposure as person-time accumulated above a temperature cutoff, a quantity that confounds the choice of cutoff, the duration of individual exposure, and the share of the population affected. Our study addresses these gaps by developing a double-dual-distributional framework that jointly considers two types of geospatial and temporal distributions (ambient temperatures and child populations) and two types of heat exposure thresholds, namely intensity (heat levels) and duration (hourly exceedance). To illustrate, we assessed potential exposures—the ambient heat conditions experienced—among 250 million children in China, comparing the 1989–1991 and 2019–2021 periods. We found that children’s average annual exposure to moderate or stronger heat increased by 385 h, and the share exposed to strong heat for at least 12% of hours rose from 8.1% (24.9 million) to 23.7% (59.1 million). Both rising temperatures and shifts in child population distributions contribute materially to increased heat exposures in China, a finding that suggests the need for forecasts of children’s potential heat exposures to consider shifting child population distributions.

This paper presents methodological insights and implications in conducting cost evaluations from five early childhood development programs in humanitarian settings across Jordan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, and Colombia. It provides a comprehensive overview of each intervention's context, effectiveness, and costs. The paper highlights the significance of valuing the opportunity cost of caregivers’ time, addresses challenges related to exchange-rate volatility in economically unstable regions, and balances ethical considerations with the pursuit of rigorous evidence through clear treatment contrasts in conducting cost analyses in humanitarian contexts. This research contributes to evidence-based practices and offers valuable guidance for policymakers and practitioners seeking to enhance the well-being of vulnerable children affected by conflict and crises in humanitarian settings by incorporating both the impacts and the costs into analyses of interventions.

Background: Climate-exacerbated flooding triggers global public health crises, costing lives, livelihoods, and jeopardising fragile healthcare systems. Despite well-established disaster management frameworks, the timely communication of rapid, locally actionable information remains lacking—leaving vulnerable populations at risk. We developed and operationally validated an open-access monitoring system across six South Asian nations, reporting the public health impact of the 2025 floods and executing live daily nowcasting during the July 2026 monsoon emergency to better understand who is in harms’ way, democratise anticipatory disaster intelligence, and support healthcare resilience. Methods: We engineered a multi-stakeholder co-designed ensemble pipeline for flood-health intelligence by fusing observations from six synthetic aperture radar and optical satellites with hydrological, demographic, agricultural, transportation, and infrastructure datasets. We estimated cumulative exposure for children and adults, alongside functional disruption to healthcare facilities, built-up areas, road networks, and cropland across remote, rural, and urban areas of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The 2025 analysis was benchmarked against publicly-available official surveillance reports and independent field-validation. The 2026 deployment is ongoing live, externally field-validated against 8 ground-sensor stations along the Indus River system. Findings: Our analysis revealed a critical gap in current surveillance. In 2025, continuous monitoring identified 257.67 million exposed individuals (29.1% in rural areas) including 89.3 million children under 18 (34.6%). A five-fold increase (72.19 million additional people) was found over the 18.97 million captured in official episode-level reports for Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Over 460, 000 km² of agricultural land was exposed (18.5 % to >2m deep water), having significant implications for the region’s predominantly agrarian economy.Across publicly unmonitored regions and flood episodes, an estimated 237 million flood-exposed people were left in a data vacuum, completely missing from publicly-available mapping. Functionally, 22,818 low-lying healthcare facilities were inundated (3,041 functionally disrupted), severing last-mile care for 46.79 million people, including 28.54 million exposed to deep-water flooding (>2m). In each country, access to at least 5% healthcare facilities was disrupted. Our rapid monitoring of the July–August 2026 crisis has already reported 11,905 km² of inundation, 92,140 km of submerged roads, 5.19 million exposed people including 1.6 million children (30.8%), and disruption to 1,900 basic health units, community clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals. Interpretation: This first region-wide, multi-year study demonstrates that current global disaster response relies on severely incomplete or inaccessible data, effectively disenfranchising the world's most underserved and climate-vulnerable populations from healthcare when most needed. Rapid, reliable, and scalable precision intelligence is not a technical luxury but a necessary and achievable instrument for health equity and climate justice. To counter 21st-century global health threats, we recommend: (1) prioritising anticipatory planning for children and vulnerable communities via national action plans and community toolkits, (2) democratising disaster data through digital public infrastructure to inform e

How do geospatial sorting and social stratification condition natural-disaster exposure and impact? Using the case of the May 2022 flash floods in Pernambuco, Brazil, we address this question with a dual-source approach that captures disparities in both exposure to anomalously high rainfall and the reported impacts of resulting floods. While exposure to anomalous rainfall is tied to geospatial segregation patterns, reported impacts may also reflect localized infrastructure, such as drainage systems or piped water availability, that capture municipality-level investment and capacity to withstand flooding. Findings from exposure analysis reveal significant disparities by race, religion, maternal education, and income. However, these relationships fully attenuate after adjustment for municipal location, suggesting that settlement patterns and geospatial marginalization drive the observed exposure disparities. Findings from the analysis of self-reported flood impact also show disparate impacts by race, employment status, number of children under 15, and household income, but in this case, only racial disparities are fully attenuated after spatial adjustments. Further findings show that low-income households and those with more children report significantly greater impacts even after adjusting for both municipal fixed effects and hazard exposure. Interaction models reveal steeper dose-response relationships between rainfall and impacts for low-income households, and we find evidence that household infrastructure significantly mediates economic disparities in flood impacts. Combined, results demonstrate that relying solely on externally measured exposure to gauge the stratified impacts of extreme precipitation or flash floods may miss important socioeconomic disparities. Both geospatial segregation patterns and household-level capacities to withstand environmental shocks shape vulnerability.

Various challenges are thought to render female-headed households (FHHs) in the Arab region vulnerable to poverty. Yet, previous studies show mixed results regarding the extent of FHH poverty and the absence of household-panel-survey data hinders analysis of poverty dynamics. We address these challenges by proposing a novel classification of FHHs and analyze synthetic panels constructed from 20 rounds of repeated-cross-sectional surveys from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Mauritania, the West Bank and Gaza, and Tunisia spanning the past two decades. We find that the definition of FHHs matters for measuring poverty levels and dynamics. Most types of FHHs are less poor than non–FHHs on average, but FHHs with females as a majority of adults are generally poorer. FHHs are more likely to escape poverty than households on average, but FHHs without children are the most likely to do so. While more children are generally associated with more poverty for FHHs, there is heterogeneity across countries in addition to heterogeneity across definitions of FHHs. The findings provide useful inputs for the design and targeting of social-protection programs aimed at reducing gender inequalities and poverty in the Arab region.

We revisit much-investigated relationships between schooling and health, focusing on schooling impacts on cognitive abilities at older ages using the Harmonized Cognition Assessment Protocol in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and a bounding approach that requires relatively weak assumptions. Our estimated upper bounds on the population average effects indicate potentially large causal effects of increasing schooling from primary to secondary. Yet, these upper bounds are smaller than many estimates from studies of causal schooling impacts on cognition using compulsory schooling laws. We also cannot rule out small and null effects at this margin. However, we find evidence for positive causal effects on cognition of increasing schooling from secondary to tertiary. We replicate findings from the HRS using data on older adults from the Midlife in United States Development Study Cognitive Project. We further explore possible mechanisms behind the schooling effect (e.g., health, socioeconomic status, occupation, and spousal schooling), finding suggestive evidence of effects through such mechanisms.

Introduction Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) often dedicate limited domestic funds to expand quality early childhood care and education (ECCE), making complementary international donor support potentially important. However, research on the allocation of international development assistance for ECCE has been limited. Methods We analysed data from the Creditor Reporting System on aid projects to assess global development assistance for ECCE in 134 LMICs from 2007 to 2021. By employing keyword-searching and funding-allocation methods, we derived two estimates of ECCE aid: a lower-bound estimate comprising projects primarily focusing on ECCE and an upper-bound estimate comprising projects with both primary and partial ECCE focus, as well as those that could benefit ECCE but did not include ECCE keywords. We also assessed aid directed to conflict-affected countries and to ECCE projects integrating COVID-19-related activities. Results Between 2007 and 2021, the lower-bound ECCE aid totaled US$3646 million, comprising 1.7% of the total US$213 279 million allocated to education. The World Bank led in ECCE aid, contributing US$1944 million (53.3% out of total ECCE aid). Low-income countries received less ECCE aid per child before 2016, then started to catch up but experienced a decrease from US$0.8 (2020) per child to US$0.6 (2021) per child. Funding for ECCE projects with COVID-19 activities decreased from a total of US$50 million in 2020 to US$37 million in 2021, representing 11.4% and 6.6% of annual total ECCE aid, respectively. Over 15 years, conflict-affected countries received an average of US$0.3 per child, a quarter of the aid received by non-conflict-affected countries (US$1.2 per child). Conclusion Although ECCE aid increased significantly between 2007 and 2021, its proportion of total educational aid fell short of UNICEF’s suggested 10% minimum. Recommendations include increasing the share of ECCE aid in total educational aid, increasing aid to low-income and conflict-affected countries, and investing more in preparing ECCE programmes for future global crises.