Browsing by Subject "natural disasters"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Contextualizing Nashville’s Response to its Affordable Housing Crisis
    (2021-05) Carrier, Benjamin J.
    Over the past decade, Nashville has experienced disruptive political, social, and economic instability and suffered devastating effects from a number of natural disasters. Despite the challenges, the city has also experienced significant population growth and was recently ranked among the top ten performing metropolitan areas in the U.S. The city’s increased population paired with its insufficient housing supply has contributed to aggressive real estate speculation and dramatic neighborhood change throughout the city. This activity has produced an environment where housing is increasingly unattainable for many Nashvillians and has provoked in many residents a distrust and resentment toward the development community. In acknowledgment of the city’s urgent housing needs, Nashville’s Mayor announced his administration’s formation of an Affordable Housing Task Force in January 2021. In order to produce an assessment of its work, I closely monitored the Affordable Housing Task Force over a period of 12 weeks. To contextualize the work of the Affordable Housing Task Force, I have included some recent history in this report along with an analysis of the city’s population changes between 2010 and 2019.
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    An Evaluation of the Literacy Demands of Online Natural Disaster Preparedness Materials for Families
    (Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 2020) So, Marvin; Franks, Jessica L.; Cree, Robyn A.; Leeb, Rebecca T.
    Objective: Natural disasters are becoming increasingly common, but it is unclear whether families can comprehend and use available resources to prepare for such emergencies. The objective of this study was to evaluate the literacy demands of risk communication materials on natural disasters for US families with children. Methods: In January 2018, we assessed 386 online self-directed learning resources related to emergency preparedness for natural disasters using 5 literacy assessment tools. Assessment scores were compared by information source, audience type, and disaster type. Results: One-in-three websites represented government institutions, and 3/4 were written for a general audience. Nearly 1-in-5 websites did not specify a disaster type. Assessment scores suggest a mismatch between the general population’s literacy levels and literacy demands of materials in the areas of readability, complexity, suitability, web usability, and overall audience appropriateness. Materials required more years of education beyond the grade level recommended by prominent health organizations. Resources for caregivers of children generally and children with special health care needs possessed lower literacy demands than materials overall, for most assessment tools. Conclusions: Risk communication and public health agencies could better align the literacy demands of emergency preparedness materials with the literacy capabilities of the general public.
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    Three Essays on the Impacts of Climate Change
    (2022-07) Djoumessi Tiague, Berenger
    In this dissertation, the focus is on the impacts of natural disasters and extreme air pollution on household and individual welfare as well as mitigative strategies. In Chapter 1, I study the impacts of large-scale floods in Tanzania on households’ value of crop production, income, expenditures, and life satisfaction. I use three-year nationally representative panel microdata from Tanzania combined with satellite flood data and I analyze the impacts of the shocks using a kernel weighting difference-in-differences approach. I find a 34 percent decrease in the value of crop production for households living in affected villages or clusters two years after the shocks. I find no effects on total expenditures or child nutrition, but a significant negative effect on self-employment income and a persistent decrease in life satisfaction. Finally, access to safety nets or transfer income, and to forest in a village appears to have important mitigating effects. In chapter 2, I look at how women outcomes (i.e., intimate partner violence, fertility preferences) and children’s outcomes (i.e., mortality and nutrition) are affected after households across Sub-Saharan Africa get exposed to large floods. Combining nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys with satellite flood data, I find that women living in flooded clusters experience an overall decline in emotional violence by 0.04 percentage points, but no effect on physical violence from their partner. Fertility preferences change as women decrease their ideal number of kids by 5.3%. Child mortality also increases but only for children that are 6 months old or less. The results across subgroups show that only the poorest households experience an increase in physical violence, as well as when both partners work in agriculture. The drop in fertility preferences is concentrated among women with little to no education. The decrease in female economic empowerment, increase in partner’s alcohol consumption, and household wealth appear to be important mediating factors. The results should be taken with caution given the violation of parallel pre-trends and the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. Chapter 3 investigates another type of environmental shock, air pollution. I estimate the effects of exposure to ambient air pollution on daily health-related behaviors, weekly labor supply, and productivity at the workplace among US individuals. Using an individual fixed-effects regression approach, I examine how daily changes in outdoor air quality influence the time spent on daily health-related activities. I find that only when the air quality index becomes very unhealthy or hazardous, there is a 21% decrease in the minutes spent on outdoor sports and exercise activities, and a 260% increase in minutes spent watching TV. The increase in physical inactivity can have long-term negative health consequences. I also implement an instrumental variable (IV) strategy using wind direction and atmospheric boundary layer height as exogenous shocks to satellite-based aerosols to understand how changes in air pollution affect weekly labor supply and productivity. I find that increase in the total aerosol optical depth (AOD) leads to no overall change in labor supply decisions, both on the decision to go to work and the weekly worked hours. There are also no overall significant effects on labor productivity proxied by weekly earnings. The effects across subgroups also suggest differential effects in avoidance behaviors across the income distribution, age groups, occupations, race, and ethnicity, especially when the air quality is very unhealthy or hazardous.