Climate adaptation and disaster relief in Pakistan’s devastating floods
This project examines low-income households’ strategies for coping with and adapting to extreme weather in the context of the 2022 flooding in Pakistan.
Extreme weather events are increasingly common due to climate change. Low-income households in developing countries are disproportionately impacted because of their location, occupational opportunities, and resource constraints. Little is known about how such disasters affect these households, how they adapt, and how state interventions shape their resilience to future shocks. We study these questions in the context of the 2022 flooding in Pakistan. These floods were exceptional in their scale; according to news reports, a third of the country experienced floods, and satellite imagery shows a tenth of the country to be underwater. These floods were also unprecedented as they were driven by rain 500% above Sindh's 50-year average.
We are collaborating with the World Bank and the Government of Sindh (GoS) to evaluate two flood rehabilitation programmes: (i) home reconstruction and (ii) public workfare to rebuild damaged infrastructure. These programmes may increase welfare and local economic activity, while facilitating adaptation (e.g., short-term migration) by alleviating liquidity constraints. However, because they are aimed at places and not people, they may also tie low-income households to climate-exposed locations, discouraging migration. We leverage the staggered rollout of these programmes to evaluate them at scale.
In this project, we compare low-income, rural households across 6 districts of Sindh, which vary in their local exposure to the 2022 floods. We document how households (i) cope with the immediate consequences of floods and (ii) make forward-looking investments to insure against future shocks. We also collect rich data on flood damages (including loss of income or assets, health impacts, and disruption of social networks and trade), coping strategies (including drawdown of savings, sale of assets, new loans, increased labour supply, changes to educational or nutritional investments), and adaptation (including diversification of networks or assets and migration).