Post-disaster fertility: Hurricane Katrina and the changing racial composition of New Orleans

Abstract

Large-scale climate events can have enduring effects on population size and composition. Natural disasters affect population fertility through multiple mechanisms, including displacement, demand for children, and reproductive care access. Fertility effects, in turn, influence the size and composition of new birth cohorts, extending the reach of climate events across generations. We study these processes in New Orleans during the decade spanning Hurricane Katrina. We combine census data, ACS data, and vital statistics data to describe fertility in New Orleans and seven comparison cities. Following Katrina, displacement contributed to a 30% decline in birth cohort size. Black fertility fell, and remained 4% below expected values through 2010. By contrast, white fertility increased by 5%. The largest share of births now occurs to white women. These fertility differences—beyond migration-driven population change—generate additional pressure on the renewal of New Orleans as a city in which the black population is substantially smaller in the disaster’s wake.

The impact of climate change on fertility*

“…9 A recent study finds that temperature may have long-run effects on fertility via reproductive health [6], a finding which is consistent with evidence on short-run temperature fluctuations and seasonality [7,8]. Similarly, climate change can cause other large societal disruptions, such as natural disasters and civil war, that may also impact fertility patterns [9][10][11][12]. While important, these mechanisms are not within the scope of the current study, which focuses on economic mechanisms.…”

“…These estimates are particularly well suited to our application, because they were generated for a two-sector model similar to ours. 12 Our focus is on the demographic effects of climate change, rather than the causes of climate change or the optimal policy response. Consequently, we consider the case of a small economy for which technological progress and global temperature can be taken as exogenous variables.…”

“…The online supplementay material is available online: stacks.iop. org/ERL/14/054007/mmedia and contains the key equations for our economic model and a related discussion 12. These damage estimates do not allow for 'tipping points' in climate damages[53][54][55].…”

Climate shocks constrain human fertility in Indonesia

“…Conversely, other studies argue that the displacement caused by heavy hurricane exposure is associated with reduced births in the aftermath of the event (Evans, Hu, & Zhao, 2010;Pörtner, 2008). As hurricanes often disproportionately impact certain subpopulations, these events may also change the racial or ethnic composition of the population by affecting which women give birth following the storm (Seltzer & Nobles, 2017). Although studies examining fertility-hurricane relationships differ in the directionality of the effects they find, authors which examined births several years following a disaster find that the fertility rate generally reverts back to pre-disaster levels well after the event, and the effects of the hurricane do not appear to have long-term impacts on fertility (J.…”

Mobile Worlds: Choice at the Intersection of Demographic and Environmental Change

“…There is also some suggestion that the seasonality of births in turn influences rates of childhood diseases and mortality (36,37). Natural disasters also appear to lower fertility in the short term, at least for some affected populations (38,39). There are, however, no direct studies on whether increased temperatures due to climate change will have any significant effect on fertility in and of itself: The observed relationship is weak and contingent on several uncertain variables, and troughs in fertility are followed by subsequent increases.…”