Not a dream wedding: The hidden nexus between gender discrimination, climate change and child marriage

Abstract

Could climate change and child marriage be related? At first, it may seem unlikely, but if we consider the impact of climate change on poverty and income, the connection becomes more plausible. In this paper we use a structural equation model to investigate this relationship. Our results indicate that increased "climate vulnerability," as measured by the ND-GAIN index, is associated with both a direct increase in child marriage and indirect increases due to higher poverty and gender inequality. However, since climate vulnerability is highly correlated with national economics, it is possible that poverty is the underlying factor behind both child marriage and climate vulnerability itself. When we replaced climate vulnerability with climate exposure (a variable based solely on the biophysics of climate change), our results remained largely consistent. This supports our model's premise that climate change primarily affects child marriage through its impacts on access to resources and income, which in turn affect the main drivers of child marriage: extreme poverty and gender inequality. Our findings have broader implications, as it is likely that several negative social outcomes of climate change work through similar mechanisms, i.e., an indirect impact of climate change on social variables mediated through its previous effects on economic variables. Finally, our study highlights some implications for cost-benefit analyses of climate change.