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Suicide is one of the leading death causes worldwide, mainly among young adults, and Colombia has experienced an increase during the XXI century. The suicide impact has diverged between age groups and locations in Colombia, where young adults have taken higher incidences than the other age groups. The COVID-19 lockdown induced changes in mental health, affecting the previous suicide trends in the country. We conducted a spatiotemporal analysis of suicide attempts in Colombia per age group, adopting Bayesian models that represent 85,526 individual records in 1,121 municipalities from 2018 to 2020 using R-INLA. We found that Colombia exhibited an increase in suicide-attempt incidence from 2018 to 2019, and suddenly, the incidence fell in the first semester of 2020. The fixed effect of the models evidenced the highest risk in overall municipalities per trimester in the age group between 15-19 years old. The spatial random effect per model evidenced municipalities with the highest risk in the age groups between 10 to 59 years, mainly in the states in the Andean region of Colombia, and other states such as Putumayo, Vaupés, Arauca, Córdoba, Amazonas, and Meta. The temporal random effect evidenced a decay in suicide trends from the fourth trimester of 2019 to 2020, except in the age group > 59 years old. Geographically, our study pinpointed specific regions in Colombia, particularly in the central, southwest, and southeast areas, where the incidence of suicide attempts exceeded 100 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The nuanced breakdown of incidence across different age groups further underscores the importance of tailoring preventive strategies based on age-specific and regional risk factors.

The agricultural sector of Colombia supports the national economy and food security due to the rich lands for cultivation. Although Colombia has a vast hydrological basin, climate change can impact agricultural productivity, generating economic and social adverse effects. For this, we evaluated the impact of some environmental variables on the production of the most sold crops using production, climatic, and hydrological data of the 1121 municipalities from 2007 to 2020. We modeled the production of coffee, rice, palm oil, sugarcane, and corn, adopting a Bayesian spatio-temporal model that involved a set of environmental variables: average temperature, minimum temperature, maximum temperature, evapotranspiration, precipitation, runoff, soil moisture, vapor pressure, radiation, and wind speed. We found that increases in the average temperatures can affect coffee (-0.2% per °C), rice (-3.76% per °C), and sugarcane (-0.19% per °C) production, meanwhile, these increases can boost palm oil (+2.55% per °C) and corn (+1.28% per °C) production in Colombia. This statement implies that the agricultural sector needs to substitute land use, promoting the production of palm oil and corn. Although our results did not find a significant effect of hydrological variables in any crop, suggesting that the abundance of water in Colombia might balance the impact of these variables. The increases in vapor pressure impact all the crops negatively (between -11.2% to -0.43% per kPa), except rice, evidencing that dry air conditions affect agricultural production. Colombia must manage the production location of the traditional products and implement agro-industrial technologies to avoid the climate change impact on crops., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Cortés-Cataño et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)