ABSTRACT:
Child undernutrition remains a leading cause of mortality and lifelong morbidity. In India, approximately a third of children under five are stunted, and agricultural livelihoods remain highly climate-sensitive. While links between crop failure and undernutrition are well documented, few studies have formally attributed child health impacts to anthropogenic climate change through agricultural pathways. We develop an event attribution framework linking anthropogenic climate change to child stunting via crop yield anomalies, focusing on the drought-related crop yield anomalies around 2015 and quantifying the extent to which their health impacts can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. We combine individual-level data from two waves of the Demographic and Health Surveys India (NFHS-4; NFHS-5) with district-level seasonal yield data for staple crops across 14 agricultural states. We construct a production-weighted crop yield anomaly index capturing deviations from long-term district trends during prenatal and infancy periods. Exposure-response functions are estimated using a two-wave design exploiting within-state variation in anomaly severity and birth timing. Applying factual and counterfactual climate scenarios to process-based crop models and combining the resulting yield estimates with the exposure-response functions, we estimate the extent to which anthropogenic climate change exacerbated these deficits and thus contributed to the observed stunting burden. Among ~62000 children, we find an asymmetric exposure-response relationship: a one standard deviation decrease in crop yields during early life increases the odds of severe stunting by approximately 10%, while positive yield anomalies show no corresponding benefit. Effects are driven primarily by severe deficits exceeding two standard deviations below trend. The finding that crop failures significantly harm child growth while good harvests do not compensate highlights the need for protective safety nets alongside agricultural adaptation in climate-vulnerable settings.