impacts of natural disasters on children discussion by emilia simeonova the future of children,...

Impacts of Natural Disasters on Children

DiscussionBy 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

Climate change

Higher volatility leads to more extreme events

Extreme events affect children

Shocks in childhood affect long-term outcomes

?policy response?

Time/causal arrow

?policy response?

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