Estimating the relationship between extreme climate events and early female marriage in Bangladesh

Livia Elisa Ortensi , Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna
Francesca Tosi , University of Bologna
Rosella Rettaroli, Università di Bologna

Women are more vulnerable than men to the consequences of extreme climate events, which exacerbate poverty and contribute to increasing the risk of sexual violence toward unmarried girls. In such situations, parents may adopt suboptimal coping strategies by marrying their daughters at younger ages to reduce household consumption and the risk for their daughters to become unmarriageable due to sexual violence. Both NGOs and qualitative scientists highlight that extreme weather events and the practice of early female marriage are interconnected, especially in countries where child marriage is being practiced for a long time and natural disasters regularly strike the local populations. Using multilevel discrete time survival logit modelling and drawing from both demographic (DHS) and climatological (EM-DAT and SPEI index) data, this paper aims to establish if a linkage between the occurrence of natural disasters and the practice of early marriage in Bangladesh exists by evaluating the relationship between environmental vulnerability and higher tendency to marry at younger ages. Preliminary results suggest that exceptional climatic events—namely severely wet weather conditions—accelerate the transition to marriage for young women in Bangladesh, while extremely wet conditions appear to be significant in increasing the odds of experiencing a transition into marriage before turning 18.

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 Presented in Session P27. Development, Gender, and the Environment