The BirthClim_IT Dataset: Fertility, Environment, and Territorial Contexts in Italy, 2003–2022

BirthClim_IT is a harmonized municipality-level longitudinal dataset combining fertility, environmental, climatic, geographic, and socioeconomic information for Italy from January 2003 to December 2022. The dataset is structured at the municipality-by-month level and harmonized to the administrative boundaries defined by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) as of January 1, 2024. The repository provides a full dataset covering 7,896 Italian municipalities with 126 variables and a spatially aggregated version comprising 4,936 spatial units with 117 variables. The aggregated dataset was created by iteratively merging municipalities with fewer than 12 births in 2022 with the most similar contiguous municipality within the same province, based on standardized environmental, geographic, and demographic characteristics. The repository also includes the R code used for the spatial aggregation, a complete codebook, and the datasets in R, Stata, and SPSS formats. BirthClim_IT is designed to support research on fertility and its environmental and territorial contexts in Italy.