Climate shocks, attitudes towards intimate partner violence, and the protective role of climate-resilience projects

This study investigates the impact of climate change on intimate partner violence attitudes in Bangladesh and shows that policy can mitigate much, if not all, of the harmful consequences of climate shocks on women. Utilizing a novel dataset linking geo-referenced meteorological data with information on women’s attitudes, we find that dry shocks increase tolerance for intimate partner violence among women in poor and agriculture-dependent communities, with suggestive evidence that this happens due to the erosion of women’s outside options. Distributed-lag estimates show that these effects persist beyond the immediate period of exposure, consistent with a gradual weakening of women’s fallback positions rather than a purely short-run stress-induced or backlash response. Climate resilience projects funded by the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust (BCCT), a domestic climate fund, mitigate the negative impacts of dry shocks, highlighting the significant role of such initiatives in generating positive ameliorative spillover effects. Remotely sensed data on land use and crop-yield indicators reveal that these projects protect agriculture during dry shocks, especially in the rainfed Aman season, thus providing a credible test of the importance of the agricultural transmission channel and the pathway through which such projects buffer climate shocks. Our findings underline the crucial role of targeted policies in fostering climate adaptation.