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