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