Poverty analysis in the lowlands of Papua New Guinea underscores climate vulnerability and need for income flexibility*

Abstract

A severe El Niño event in 2015/16 decimated an important share of Papua New Guinea's (PNG) local crop production, leaving 10 per cent of the population with significant food shortages. Lack of recent socio‐economic data and analysis of the country's rural population impeded efforts to plan and mitigate the ensuing food crisis. This paper presents the most recent poverty analysis in Papua New Guinea in nearly a decade, and a renewed effort to inform rural production, consumption and livelihood patterns in some of the country's most remote, lowland areas. We designed a rural household survey that collected detailed consumption and expenditure data to explore poverty prevalence and correlates of per capita household expenditure. Results suggest that approximately half of the sampled individuals live in households with total per capita expenditures below the poverty line. Climate shocks have significant and possibly long‐term consequences for household welfare. Households that experienced a drought in the last 5 years are associated with significantly lower per capita expenditures. Labour diversification, via migration, is associated with greater welfare. Households with at least one migrant member are associated with 13 per cent greater per capita expenditure.

Validating a Tailored Disaster Risk Assessment Methodology: Drought Risk Assessment in Local PNG Regions

“…Eight reputable literature sources detailing drought conditions around the time of each event indicated by the risk assessment (2015-2016 and 2019-2020) were analysed to determine the ground-truth of the drought event severity and impact. As two drought events were investigated, and eight sources were assessed for each event, a total of 16 sources were assessed overall Gwatirisa et al, 2017;Burivalova et al, 2018;Jacka, 2020;Varotsos et al, 2018;Schmidt et al, The records in the literature were not extensive for the 2019-2020 drought event in PNG. An array of records was available…”

“…Central and Gulf Province were indicated among the five most at-risk provinces by the risk assessment but were included in the most at-risk provinces described by the literature. This might have been because the majority (five out of eight) of the 'ground-truth' sources used to investigate the impacts of the 2015-2016 drought event focused on only one aspect of drought (meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, or socioeconomic), and thus did not consider the holistic impacts suffered by specific provinces like Central and Gulf Province Burivalova et al, 2018;Varotsos et al, 2018;Schmidt et al, 2021;Gwatirisa et al, 2017). Comparatively, the risk assessment methodology of this study incorporated indicators for all types of drought's impacts to provide a comprehensive risk level for each province.…”

“…-Data is available for recent years from PNG National Statistical Office. 1988, 1989, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2020) and (b) El Niño events (El Niño years being 1982, 1987, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2002, 2006, and Gwatirisa et al, 2017;Burivalova et al, 2018;Jacka, 2020;Varotsos et al, 2018;Schmidt et al,…”

Impacts of COVID‐19 induced income and rice price shocks on household welfare in Papua New Guinea: Household model estimates

“…PNG's two largest cities, Port Moresby and Lae were included in separate metropolitan strata. 4 Schmidt et al (2019) (Schmidt Gilbert, et al, 2020). Rice consumption in the other regions is estimated using shares of total rice consumption in the non-Momase regions from the 2009/10 HIES.…”

“…;Schmidt, Gilbert et al, 2020;Zezza et al, 2017).Note: PGK = Papua New Guinea Kina; T-test p-value is derived from a t test of equal variances, standard deviations are presented below in brackets. a Major market towns for each area include: Wewak (East Sepik), Maprik (East Sepik), Nuku (West Sepik), Vanimo (West Sepik), Madang (Madang), Kieta (Bougainville), Arawa (Bougainville), Buka (Bougainville); USD 1.00 = PGK 3.28 in June 2018.…”