India’s Drought Is Killing Crops—And Pushing People to Suicide

An estimated 59,300 farmers in India have taken their lives in similarly overt ways since 1980. The correlation between suicide rates and rising temperatures was long suspected but never uncovered in large-scale data until research released in July 2017. Lab’s Tamma Carleton—then a Ph.D. candidate in agriculture and resource economics at University of California, Berkeley—made the connection in a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Suicide is a stark indicator of human hardship, yet the causes of these deaths remain understudied, particularly in developing countries,” Carleton wrote. This story recaps her findings.