Aditi Bhowmick, an Indian PhD affiliate concentrating in Development Economics and Labor Economics, is one of inaugural recipients of the Mittal Institute Faculty Climate Research Grants at Harvard University.
She will be co-leading a groundbreaking research project on gendered climate vulnerability in India, reinforcing her commitment to addressing economic and social disparities through rigorous research.
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These grants are designed to foster deeper scholarly engagement on climate change in South Asia, catalyze the creation of new knowledge, and contribute to the development of sustainable solutions. Projects focused on three main research categories: energy transition and energy policy; food systems, agriculture, and land use; and law and policy for climate transition and adaptation.
Bhowmick will co-lead the research project with Eliana La Ferrara, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts, floods, and heatwaves, jeopardize decades of progress towards gender equity in South Asia, the researchers note. For example, recent media reports have highlighted the phenomenon of “climate brides” – girls forced into marriage due to extreme weather events despite existing laws outlawing child marriage in the region.
In turn, early marriage leads to increased risk of teenage pregnancies, maternal morbidity, domestic violence, and poor child health outcomes, perpetuating cycles of health inequality. Despite the interplay of climate shocks and gender and health inequities in India, systematic research is hindered by the lack of interoperable data.
Bhowmick and La Ferrara’s project aims to fill this gap by integrating historical ethnographic archives (1920-1960), modern census records, and satellite data capturing climate and economic shocks for India’s 600,000 villages and towns.
Their research will address the following questions: a) What is the causal relationship between climate change and adverse gender and health outcomes–in particular, child marriage–across rural India? b) Do community-specific historical social norms mediate this relationship?
The project’s data infrastructure will be shared as a digital public good, akin to Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas for Sub-Saharan Africa, facilitating interdisciplinary research and policymaking.
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By incorporating community-level data on norms with geographic and economic data sources, such as census records and satellite measures, the project will empower researchers, data journalists, think tanks, and policymakers to better understand and address the challenges posed by climate change toward gender inequity in India.
Bhowmick, a second year PhD student in Public Policy (Economics Track) at the Harvard Kennedy School, is also a PhD Scholar at the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality & Social Policy. She is currently building a research agenda on social norms and gender inequality across developing countries.