A hot topic: Learning in a high temperature environment
In the first article of the series on the effects of climate change on education we went through some macro-social reasons why easing access to high quality education is important to ensure political stability and a stable economic growth for a country. In the second part of it we also saw what the major issues are concerning the developing countries’ ability to guarantee such right.
I bet that everyone reading this article studied something during a hot summer. We all know how difficult it is to try and grasp something in a high temperature room, while having that upsetting sensation of fatigue that isn’t there in other periods of the year. Imagine now to generalize that sensation to an entire country for an extended period. What effects could arise on a larger scale? How impactful can they be on the development of the country itself?
The global temperature has risen by 1°C above pre-industrial level, with heterogeneous effects across different countries. This 1 degree represents an average, as the increase wasn’t uniform in the whole globe, implying that there are zones which suffered a higher impact. In particular, in Figure 1 we can notice that it is estimated that on the hottest days African, Middle Eastern and Amazonian countries are some of the territories that heat up the most.
Whenever the experts work on how temperature affects individuals, the measure they consider is the wet-bulb temperature. Wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature an object can reach by evaporation, measured using a thermometer covered with a wet cloth. It reflects how much cooling can happen as water evaporates into the air. When humidity is 100%, wet-bulb temperature equals the air temperature, but when the air is less humid, the wet-bulb temperature is lower due to the cooling effect of evaporation.
Figure 1: Distribution of temperature increase given the average 1.5 °C increase from pre-industrial levels. The hottest days are the ones whose wet-bulb temperature increases above 30°C. Source: IPCC – Global warming 1.5 °C
In countries where most of the schools do not have proper generalized air conditioning systems, any increase in wet-bulb temperature above the 35°C threshold puts in danger children health. It was the case of South Sudan in March 2024 when the government had to close schools as a violent heatwave was hitting the country. The same happened in Bangladesh in April, with more than 30 million students kept out of schools. But the most representative case is the one regarding South-Asian countries like Pakistan, India and even Philippines, whose unique meteorological conditions make them vulnerable to high temperature variations as well as violent precipitations.
However, it was found a direct connection between human-induced climate change and extreme cold weather events. Cold weather also disrupts schooling and learning through property damage, power failures, and school closures. Even though it is less likely to witness such events globally, some regions like Central Asia and parts of Australia and South America have seen increases in both extreme heat and cold. For instance, winter storms in Mongolia and recent storms in Europe and the U.S. caused significant educational impacts, including school closures.
In environments in which the temperature isn’t high enough to be physically harmful, productivity might be still severely affected. Goodman’s team isolated a strong relationship between heat exposure and academic achievement, which manifests itself with a substantial difference in average performance between southern schools and northern ones when it comes to comparing PSAT (their proxy) scores in the US or with lower scores among retakers (people who take the test more than once in different years, controlling for other factors) when the year was hotter on average. The effect size was found to be higher for low-income clusters, which led the researchers to hypothesize that such clusters have less margins of adaptation (with no access to alternative materials or private lectures) and would be correlated with going to a school with poor air conditioning. Such reasons are externally valid also for this case, as people in developing countries would have similar issues as discussed in the previous article.
On a country level such a relationship is not linear, but reverse U-shaped. Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel (2015) find that each country (we could argue regions and towns even) has a temperature which represents its “soft spot”. Any increase in temperature that is lower than that spot increases total country productivity, while any increase beyond that is detrimental to workers’ productivity.
Living in a hotter environment influences education outcomes also through powerful indirect channels. As the weather becomes more extreme, the living standards drop, reducing the learning process quality of the people involved. This may happen through worse psychological conditions, substitution effects of worse economic conditions (Figure 2) that influence consumption decisions (as I am poorer I spend more to satisfy my physiological needs rather than on education) and damage to infrastructures.
The world’s heating is also affecting the chance of such countries to catch up on education investments with respect to the West. The climate vulnerability has shown to have affected negatively the interest paid on sovereign debt, increasing the cost of it by more than 1%, which translates in roughly 40 billion dollars per country in the last 10 years. The risk affects also the private sector of such countries, leading the total cost to an average of 62 billion dollars per country. This reduces the size of the investments the government can make to improve the education system’s quality, while also having a direct negative effect on households’ income.
Figure 2: Estimated cumulative GDP loss for developing countries. Source: De Bandt Olivier, Jacolin Luc, Lemaire Thibault (2018)
From a policy making perspective however, it must be said that there is no standard solution that can be applied everywhere. As the effects of the increase in temperature are heterogeneous depending on the part of the globe, there is a portion of the literature that identifies countries that benefit from it. For instance, Nepal and Afghanistan are predicted to benefit from the increase in temperature, as it is below that “soft spot” that was cited earlier.
For this reason, the World Bank suggests categorizing countries in what are called Hotspots, whose identification depends on two factors:
the magnitude and seasonality of climate change.
the relationship between climate and living standards at a given location.
Once hotspots have been recognized, it is then possible to move to a deeper analysis of the territory, both structural and cultural, to identify what are the best policies to apply.
In conclusion, I believe that this issue is mostly a matter of justice and equality. Even though these countries account for just 10% of total emissions, their students are paying the highest price. This situation is not a projection of the future, but represents the reality for 86% of the global population. There is still time to act, but it requires funds which are becoming more expensive and specific knowledge for each intervention.