Mitigating humanitarian impacts of climate-related disasters

In a rapidly warming world, disasters are escalating in frequency and intensity. Climate-related hazards pose serious threats to affected populations, with low- and middle-income countries being at greatest risk and experiencing most disaster-related deaths. While the devastating impacts of these hazards are well documented, how to mitigate such impacts is less well-understood. This paper aims to address this limitation in aid and disaster impact research by examining the effects of aid on disaster fatalities across various types of climate-related hazards. Our analysis focuses on climate-related disasters recorded by the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) (CRED 2023), including information on the number of disaster fatalities – the primary dependent variable in this study. We use the geo-coded version of EM-DAT (GDIS) (Rosvold and Buhaug 2021) and calculate meteorological hazard measures for droughts, extreme temperature, floods, and storms. We further account for population exposure, local development (SHDI), compound events, and armed conflict.  The paper will make two contributions: First, we provide the first global analysis of drivers of subnational disaster impacts by using an original meteorological reanalysis of hazard severity 1990-2018. Second, we combine novel subnational aid data from GODAD (Bomprezzi et al. 2024) with hand-coded UN disaster aid flow data at the disaster-event level (Dellmuth et al. 2021), allowing us to study how different types of aid shape the humanitarian impacts of disasters. By addressing critical gaps in understanding how aid can reduce disaster fatalities, this work provides urgently needed insights into mitigating human vulnerability in an era of escalating climate risks.

 

Bomprezzi, Pietro, Axel Dreher, Andreas Fuchs, Teresa Hailer, Andreas Kammerlander, et al. 2024. “Wedded to Prosperity? Informal Influence and Regional Favoritism.”

CRED. 2023. “EM-DAT: The International Disaster Database.” Brussels, Belgium. https://www.emdat.be/.

Dellmuth, Lisa M., Frida A.-M. Bender, Aiden R. Jönsson, Elisabeth L. Rosvold, and Nina von Uexkull. 2021. “Humanitarian Need Drives Multilateral Disaster Aid.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (4). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018293118.

Rosvold, Elisabeth L., and Halvard Buhaug. 2021. “GDIS, a Global Dataset of Geocoded Disaster Locations.” Scientific Data 8 (61). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00846-6.