Disaster risk, climate change, and poverty: assessing the global exposure of poor people to floods and droughts
By Hessel Winsemius, Brenden Jongman, T. Veldkamp, Stéphane Hallegatte, M. Bangalore, Philip J. Ward. Environment and Development Economics, 2015
310 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract People living in poverty are particularly vulnerable to shocks, including those caused by natural disasters such as floods and droughts. This paper analyses household survey data and hydrological riverine flood and drought data for 52 countries to find out whether poor people are disproportionally exposed to floods and droughts, and how this exposure may change in a future climate. We find that poor people are often disproportionally exposed to droughts and floods, particularly in urban areas. This pattern does not change significantly under future climate scenarios, although the absolute number of people potentially exposed to floods or droughts can increase or decrease significantly, depending on the scenario and region. In particular, many countries in Africa show a disproportionally high exposure of poor people to floods and droughts. For these hotspots, implementing risk-sensitive land-use and development policies that protect poor people should be a priority.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b3963dfc94d9fc37167810bd444d5de81897163f
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
Citations in the corpus
- Social impacts of climate change mitigation policies and their implications for inequality (2019, background): “The objectives of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are mutually reinforcing and co-dependent: climate change poses a risk to economic development, and a successful low-carbon transition depends on social, economic and environmental development (Carraro, 2016; Gomez-Ec”