Steve Berggreen

I am an environmental and development economist and a postdoctoral scholar in the Global Policy Laboratory at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability.

I study how water and climate shape human health, livelihoods, and economic development, and how people adapt to environmental change. My research combines hydrological modeling, geospatial data, and causal inference, with current projects on stagnant water and child health, drought and food security, and climate adaptation in Africa.

I hold a PhD in Economics and an MSc in Water Resources Engineering. Before my doctoral studies, I spent eight years working in water resources engineering and applied hydrology.

CV | Email: stevebc@stanford.edu | Twitter: @SteveBerggreen

Job Market Paper

The Child Health Burden of Unobserved Water (with Linn Mattisson)

How much disease is caused by environmental hazards that existing observation systems fail to detect? One such hazard is transient stagnant water, which can transmit enteric pathogens and provide mosquito breeding habitat but remains largely invisible to conventional satellite monitoring. Here we develop a 90-m hydrological model to reconstruct stagnant water across Tanzania, validate it against independent wetland and soil-moisture observations, and estimate its health effects using nationally representative child-health data. We find that moving from zero to 3% of surrounding land under stagnant water increases two-week diarrhoea prevalence by 4.8 percentage points (95% CI, 1.5–8.2), equivalent to 45% of mean prevalence, and reduces haemoglobin by 2.41 g/L (95% CI, 0.3–4.6). The diarrhoeal response is substantially larger among households relying on surface drinking water, whereas haemoglobin reductions are concentrated in malaria-suitable areas, consistent with complementary enteric and vector-borne pathways. We estimate that stagnant water accounts for 11.3% (95% CI, 4.3–18.7%) of under-five diarrhoea in Tanzania, corresponding to approximately 445 child deaths annually from the diarrhoeal pathway alone. In a policy simulation, targeting a one-percentage-point expansion in national oral-rehydration coverage towards high-exposure areas would avert an estimated 139 under-five deaths annually, twice as many as untargeted allocation. Because the model inputs are globally available, this framework can be extended beyond Tanzania to map previously unobserved stagnant-water exposure and improve the targeting of health interventions.

Read about my other research here.