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