Impacts of Natural Disasters on
Children
Discussion
By Emilia Simeonova
The Future of Children, Princeton, March 2015
Motivation
• Scientific fact: global climate is changing
• Link between warming climate and extreme events such as
floods, hurricanes, extreme heat waves
• Large literature showing that negative shocks in utero and
early childhood can have substantial short- and long-term
effects on children’s wellbeing
• What is the existing scientific evidence on the (potential)
effects of changing climate on children?
Main goals of the paper
• Identify and discuss studies that answer one or more of these
questions:
• How do natural disasters impact children and are these
impacts disproportionately strong for this demographic
group?
• Are there long-term effects and what are they?
• What are the policy implications
-
Policies that can be implemented ex-ante
Policies that can be implemented ex-post
Time/causal arrow
Climate
change
Higher
volatility leads
to more
extreme
events
Extreme events
affect children
?policy response?
?policy response?
Shocks in
childhood affect
long-term
outcomes
Main issues with literature
• Natural sciences – stage zero – link between climate change and natural
disasters needs to be stronger
• Methodology – natural disasters not necessarily random (even if intensity
likely random); preparedness and response differ across observable and
unobservable location characteristics which likely correlate with
(unobserved) family and child characteristics
• Impossible to separate the effects of experiencing the disaster per se from
the aftermath in terms of economic hardship
- this is important from a policy perspective
• Data – hard to collect in the short run because of nature of disasters; very
few locations that experience disasters collect data on long-run outcomes
• Volume – still a young (small) though growing literature
This paper
• Very comprehensive review of the literature that focuses on
three main areas: physical health impacts; mental health
impacts; schooling
• Overview focusses on research concerned with disaster
events that are sudden and weather related
• The language is accessible and the paper is easy to follow for
non-experts in the field and non-economists
• Identity of the paper?
- If mostly an overview of existing studies, we are almost done
- Especially in light of all the other chapters we saw yesterday
- Only one (working) paper that I know of that looks at the
effects of experiencing a disaster in early childhood on mental
health and substance abuse (McLean, Popovici and French,
2014)
- Literature on harvesting/culling/selection effects of disaster
exposure?
Suggestions
•
If attempting to identify important gaps and key areas for future research then I
have a few recommendations
•
Push on the link between the natural disasters literature and the more mature
literature on long-term effects of health shocks in childhood; emphasize lack of
plausible studies on long-term effects of disasters and underlying challenges even
more
•
Strengthen the discussion of the importance of parental responses
•
I would make the distinction between studies from developing countries and those
from advanced economies even more pronounced; likely different mechanisms at
play and also interest from different audience
•
Emphasize lack of studies on effectiveness of different policy in terms of disaster
preparedness and responses conditional on experiencing a disaster
•
Especially important because we may be able to find quasi-experimental settings
in policy response/convince interested parties to randomize types of response