Development Aid, Drought, and Coping Capacity

Abstract

Climate change is a major threat to sustained economic growth and wellbeing in the Global South. To what extent does official development assistance (ODA) strengthen recipient communities' capacity to cope with climatic extremes? Here, we investigate whether inflow of development aid mitigates adverse health impacts of subsequent drought among children under 5 years of age, drawing on survey data of nearly 140,000 respondents across 16 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in combination with georeferenced data on World Banksponsored ODA projects and historical weather statistics. A coarsened exact matching analysis reveals little benefit of development aid on child nutritional status under normal meteorological conditions. However, among children exposed to drought, prior aid allocation is associated with significantly reduced weight loss. While the merit of ODA in facilitating long-term growth remains debated, this study finds consistent indication that multilateral development aid improves recipient communities' capacity to cope with future drought.

Humanitarian need drives multilateral disaster aid

“…Moreover, we propose a hazard severity measure that allows for comparing disasters across disaster types, in contrast to previous disaster literature that typically operates with hazard measures for specific types, such as droughts ( 31 , 32 ) and extreme rainfall ( 33 ). Including the hazard severity measure in the regression analysis of UN aid offers an alternative to existing endogenous severity measures often used in disaster research.…”

“…Using this spatially and temporally coherent reconstruction of atmospheric conditions from a forecast model assimilated with observational data, we create hazard severity measures that are comparable across a number of important disaster types: droughts and floods based on precipitation, heat waves and cold waves based on temperature, and storms based on wind speed. Previous literature uses hazard severity measures for specific disaster types separately, such as droughts ( 31 , 32 ), rainfall shocks, and storms ( 33 ).…”

Climate change and non-migration — exploring the role of place relations in rural and coastal Bangladesh

“…Environmental push factors interact with social structures and relations, and so, migratory/non-migratory decisions can be understood as outcomes from complex livelihood strategies that households adopt in order to increase their coping capacity with change and uncertainty (De Haas, 2010;Logan et al, 2016;Maxmillan, 2016;Aniah et al, 2019;Biswas & Mallick, 2020). Multiple environmental factors influence this capacity (Rustad et al, 2019;Jackson et al, 2020), but the deeper dynamics between concurrent environmental, economic, demographic, political, and social changes are necessarily place-based, temporal, and interactive (De Haas, 2014;Jahan et al, 2015;Hoogendoorn et al, 2020). Place and place-making are therefore essential socio-material conditions of migratory/ non-migratory outcomes (Brehm et al, 2013;Simoni & Floress, 2015).…”

Vicious Circles: Violence, Vulnerability, and Climate Change

“…Adverse social and health impacts of armed conflict, beyond direct loss of lives on the battlefield, commonly include nutrition-related child stunting and wasting, increased disease exposure, reduced availability and use of health clinics, loss of schooling, mental trauma, and lowered life satisfaction (137)(138)(139)(140)(141)(142). Physical and institutional damages to the education system coupled with displacement-induced brain drain are especially damaging to a society, due to loss of human capital for a generation of war-affected individuals that makes them less prepared to cope with current and future climate-driven hazards to lives and livelihoods.…”