Complex emergencies: drivers of the humanitarian impacts of climate-related disasters

Climate-related disasters such as floods, droughts and storms often pose significant threats to human livelihoods, especially in developing countries. The extreme weather events often lead to destroying of shelter, harming of crops and livestock as well as fueling of conflicts, and the threat to human livelihoods are likely to increase due to climate change. While we know that climate change and conflict interact and reinforce each other, less is known in the context of natural disasters and disaster aid. In this paper we address this gap by studying how hazard severity, disaster exposure and drivers of vulnerability interact to produce humanitarian impacts, and if the delivery of emergency disaster aid alleviates these impacts. We do this by generating meteorological hazard severity measurements based on the reanalysis dataset ERA5, comparable across different climate-related disaster types, allowing us to study drivers of vulnerability to climate-related hazards. Secondarily, we study the role of aid allocation on limiting disaster mortality and displacement, with the results having broad implications for the understanding of disaster impacts and aid effectiveness.