Scorched Beginnings: Early-Life Heat Exposure and Learning Achievement in India

This paper examines the effects of early-life exposure to extreme heat on children's learning achievement in India. Exploiting within-district, across-cohort variation in early-life temperature exposure, we find that greater exposure to extreme heat significantly reduces reading, writing, and mathematics achievement in later childhood. These findings remain robust across a battery of robustness checks. We further show that early-life heat exposure adversely affects children's physical development, especially among children from households with limited coping capacity and those exposed to poorer disease environments, suggesting these channels play an important role in shaping later learning achievement. Finally, projections based on future climate scenarios indicate that continued warming is likely to exacerbate human capital losses in India. These findings highlight the persistent influence of early-life climate conditions on human capital formation and underscore the importance of incorporating climate resilience into education and early childhood policy in low- and middle-income countries.