When a surazo sweeps through Bolivia’s tropical lowlands, temperatures can drop rapidly, sometimes more than 10°C in a day. For households built around heat, this is not just discomfort. It is disruption: crops fail, work stops, people stay home. My research shows it also increases intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet a national-level analysis of Bolivia shows no effect of temperature on IPV at all. The risk is real, but it is invisible to frameworks that average across populations with fundamentally different climate baselines.
A growing body of literature links temperature shocks to IPV, showing that as temperatures rise and pass certain heat thresholds, women face higher risk of partner abuse (e.g. Sanz-Barbero, 2018; Zhu et al., 2023; Nguyen, 2024). However, most studies pool populations adapted to different climate baselines, producing national or cross-country averages that can mask where the real risk is concentrated. My job market paper uses Bolivia’s stark geographic contrast between tropical lowlands and high-altitude Andean regions to show what those averages hide: genuine heterogeneity in climate effects driven by local de-adaptation to certain temperatures.
Temperature Impacts in Bolivia
Using self-reported IPV data matched to high-resolution daily temperature records, I estimate the effect of temperature exposure separately for low- and high-altitude regions of Bolivia. I find that in low-altitude regions, both extreme cold and heat increase IPV incidence, though asymmetrically. Ten additional days below 21°C raise IPV incidence by about 3.6 percentage points relative to moderate temperatures, and ten additional days at or above 33°C raise IPV by about 2.2 percentage points. In a setting where roughly one in four partnered women already reports violence, this represents a 16% and 10% increase in IPV, respectively.
Meanwhile, in Bolivia’s high-altitude Andean regions, where cold temperatures are the norm and temperatures rarely reach levels associated with heat stress. the same exposure has no statistically significant effect. The heterogeneity of results between Bolivia’s high and low altitudes is flattened when examining pooled national results, which show no evidence of a relationship between temperature and IPV, further confirming that generalized analysis can mask substantial heterogeneity across regions. The impact does not come directly from the temperature itself. It is whether people are adapted to it. These findings are consistent with the concept of de-adaptation, the idea that populations are most vulnerable not to globally extreme temperatures, but to temperatures that are infrequently experienced locally.
Two Shocks, Two Pathways
Cold and heat do not increase IPV through the same pathways, and the mechanisms differ by context. In rural areas, cold spells push women into agricultural self-employment as a coping strategy, but household wealth still falls, pointing to income destruction as the primary channel. This economic stress is compounded by a rise in male alcohol consumption associated with cold days. This pattern extends beyond Bolivia: Bollman et al. (2026) find that cold exposure increases physical IPV in Peru’s highlands with effects concentrated during the crop-growing season, while Rahman and D’Exelle (2025) find that cold shocks increase physical IPV among rural women in Latin America and India, consistent with an income destruction channel in agricultural communities. In urban areas, extreme heat reduces women’s employment and increases their own alcohol consumption, pointing to both an economic and a behavioral channel. Kim (2025) corroborates this in urban Peru, finding that heat waves increase IPV through deteriorating men’s mental health and rising community violence.
What This Means for Climate Policy
These findings have direct implications for how we design climate adaptation policy. Income support programs and livelihood diversification can buffer against the income destruction that drives IPV during cold shocks in agricultural communities. Targeted prevention during cold spells, when male alcohol consumption rises, represents a concrete entry point for reducing IPV risk. More broadly, women’s safety needs to be integrated into climate adaptation planning rather than treated as a separate agenda. Climate risk frameworks that focus only on heat, or that average across climatically distinct populations, will systematically misallocate resources. The gendered costs of climate change are real, and likely larger than aggregate estimates suggest.