Solomon Hsiang’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

... Additionally, evidence suggests that economic shocks can increase the probability of multiple sexual partnerships among young women, further compounding the risk (Dinkelman et al., 2007). Beyond economic factors, environmental shocks can significantly impair cognitive and decision-making abilities (Whitmarsh et al., 2022;Hrabok et al., 2020;Palinkas and Wong, 2020;Doherty and Clayton, 2011;Almås et al., 2019). The psychological distress caused by income insecurity and livelihood losses during droughts can disrupt family planning decisions and reduce the consistent use of contraception. ...

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What Matters Most? Farmer Preferences for Agroecology Policies in Zimbabwe: A Best-Worst Scaling Experiment

... Such documentation may have been lost. New techniques are also being developed to automate georeferencing and reduce dependency on historical documentation (18), creating footprints for each image that greatly increase the efficiency of searching within an archive for coverage of a given location. ...

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A robot-assisted pipeline to rapidly scan 1.7 million historical aerial photographs

... Previous research on climate change and violence has primarily examined violence as an outcome of climate hazards (Burke et al. 2024;von Uexkull and Buhaug 2021;Stechemesser et al. 2021). 1 Within this approach, scholars investigated if, when, and how climate-related hazards shape conflict patterns (Suleymanov 2024;Michelini et al. 2023;Maconga 2023;Hastings and Ubilava 2023;Ide 2023;Cappelli et al. 2023;Mack et al. 2022;Schleussner et al. 2016). Based on this research, there is now scholarly agreement-supported by expert elicitation (Mach et al. 2019), IPCC assessments (IPCC 2023), and broader research syntheses (Beaumont and Coning 2022)-that the climateconflict relationship is highly contextual, socially mediated, and complex. ...

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A Comprehensive Framework for the Relationship Between Violence and Climate Change

... Examples include georeferenced data on political violence (Sundberg and Melander, 2013;Davies et al., 2024;Raleigh, Kishi and Linke, 2023), aid and development projects (Sexton and Zürcher, 2024;Harris and Posner, 2019), natural disasters (Young and Hsiang, 2024), air pollution (Monogan, Konisky and Woods, 2017), and human mobility (Aiken et al., 2022). ...

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Spatiotemporal causal inference with arbitrary spillover and carryover effects

... First, researchers can subset their data by time period or region to test whether the climate sensitivity varies through time or across space (Hsiang 2016;Kalkuhl & Wenz 2020;Schlenker & Roberts 2009). If sensitivity does not vary, researchers can cautiously conclude that acclimation or adaptation may not be playing a strong role (Burke et al. 2024;Hsiang 2016;Schlenker & Roberts 2009), at least within the observed data and scale. Second, researchers can include a time-period-by-climate interaction in their model to test if climate sensitivity changes over time (Dudney et al. 2021). ...

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A causal inference framework for climate change attribution in ecology

... In the case of manufacturing, extreme heat hurts value added growth in summers. This is consistent with recent literature showing that extremely hot temperature leads to more worker absenteeism 23 and lower worker productivity in the manufacturing sector (see Rode et al. 2023). Conversely, extremely hot summer helps value-added growth in services, probably in activities that alleviate heat stress (such as indoor services or beach going). ...

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Rising Temperature, Nuanced Effects: Evidence from Seasonal and Sectoral Data

... Related to these points, the service sector contributes to a large proportion of total employment in advanced countries, thus it is crucial to assess the impact of heat stress on work-related injuries in this sector (Burke et al., 2023b). In general, workers in Services are less likely to experience heat stress due to the lower physical effort required. ...

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Heat and work-related injuries: How temperature measurement affects outcomes

... We consider a stylized, medium-sized coastal town inspired by many similar examples in coastal Europe. Similar to Depsky et al. (2023), we create standardized functions for the cost of protection against varying storm surge levels and flood risk associated with new urban developments in low-lying areas, but we do so based on topography data from the Danish city Vejle. This is a step towards translating global sea level rise and population development scenarios into local flood protection scenarios and spatially explicit urban development scenarios. ...

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Evaluating the feasibility of coastal protection scenarios on a city scale across plausible pathways scenarios for both sea level rise and urban development

... Substantial variation in HDI is observed across districts within Madagascar (Box 2). Applying machine learning methods to satellite data, Sherman et al. (2023) estimate HDI at the district level for all countries including Madagascar. While wealthier districts around the capital and the northeast such as Toamasina I on the east coast had levels of HDI at just under 0.66 in 2019, close to the average among emerging economies (0.75), other districts in the central south, such as the district of Benenintra, face much lower levels of development of around 0.37. ...

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The Electricity Sector and Jirama

... This approach is thus able to capture often hard-to-model emergent climate risks and inform more tailored approaches to building resilience. robust causal identification based on isolation of system response to the unpredictable component of weather versus more predictable components like cross-sectional averages (23) and longrun trends (8,24). An overarching methodological thrust has thus been toward highly localized estimates based on shocks that are statistically well identified in terms of past exposure but may only capture a small component of projected changes in future climate. ...

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Empirical modeling of agricultural climate risk