Flood disasters and health among the urban poor

Abstract

Billions of people live in urban poverty, with many forced to reside in disaster-prone areas. Research suggests that such disasters harm child nutrition and increase adult morbidity. However, little is known about impacts on mental health, particularly of people living in slums. In this paper we estimate the effects of flood disasters on the mental and physical health of poor adults and children in urban Indonesia. Our data come from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and new surveys of informal settlement residents. We find that urban poor populations experience increases in acute morbidities and depressive symptoms following floods, that the negative mental health effects last longer, and that the urban wealthy show no health effects from flood exposure. Further analysis suggests that worse economic outcomes may be partly responsible. Overall, the results provide a more nuanced understanding of the morbidities experienced by populations most vulnerable to increased disaster occurrence.

Keywords: disaster; flood; informal settlement; mental health; urban poor.

FIGURE 1

Major flood occurrences in Indonesia and the World. Graphs created by authors based on flood occurrence data by country available at the Emergency Events Database (EM‐DAT) by the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), CRED, D. Guha‐Sapir. Disasters qualify into the database if they fulfill at least one of the following criteria: 10 or more people reported killed, 100 or more people reported affected, a declaration of a state of emergency or a call for international assistance (https://www.emdat.be/explanatory‐notes). (a) Includes the top 13 countries in the world in terms of flood occurrence in the past 50 years. (b) Shows the number of large‐scale floods reported every year since 1970 by the Indonesian authorities.