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Health and Mortality Consequences of Natural Disasters

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International Handbook of Population and Environment

Part of the book series: International Handbooks of Population ((IHOP,volume 10))

Abstract

We review, summarize, and critically evaluate recent theoretical and empirical research focusing on the health and mortality consequences of disasters. We begin with a general conceptual framework to outline key causal mechanisms linking disasters with health-related outcomes. We highlight recent substantive and methodological advances in the field and identify gaps and shortcomings. We conclude that the impacts of disasters on health and mortality are large, widely distributed, and unevenly distributed; are often spread out over a long period of time; and are conceptually complex. Our principal substantive recommendation for moving the field forward is a shift from the current primary emphasis on the health and mortality consequences of disasters that occur during the immediate aftermath of the event to a broader time horizon encompassing the medium and long term effects. Such a longer-term perspective would allow for more research on trajectories of recovery rather than reliance on point-in-time estimates. Our principal methodological recommendation is a shift to longitudinal approaches in order to avoid the many pitfalls associated with cross-sectional designs. Leveraging research already underway when a disaster strikes often makes available pre-disaster data that will be extremely valuable as the cohort is followed over time.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    By “natural disaster” we mean an event that has a principal basis in nature, i.e., an event with a significant environmental basis. We acknowledge significant human contributions to these events, such as the influence of fossil fuel consumption on global climate change, engineering failures leading to the collapse of the federal levee system after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, etc. We employ the term to exclude purposeful events such as war, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings, although we occasionally draw on studies of such events when the results seem especially relevant for an understanding of the health consequences of natural disasters. In this review paper, we use the term disaster to mean natural disaster.

  2. 2.

    Health and neighborhood poverty were not associated for these respondents at baseline (before Katrina).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Mark VanLandingham

  2. Department of Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Bonnie Bui

  3. Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Program on Population Impact, Recovery, and Resilience, New York University School of Global Public Health, New York, NY, USA

    David Abramson

  4. New York University School of Global Public Health, New York, NY, USA

    Sarah Friedman

  5. Public Health Region 6/5S Preparedness and Response Program, Texas Department of State Health Services, Austin, TX, USA

    Rhae Cisneros

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Correspondence to Mark VanLandingham .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Lori M. Hunter

  2. Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Clark Gray

  3. Campus Condorcet, National Institute for Demographic Studies, Aubervilliers Cedex, France

    Jacques Véron

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VanLandingham, M., Bui, B., Abramson, D., Friedman, S., Cisneros, R. (2022). Health and Mortality Consequences of Natural Disasters. In: Hunter, L.M., Gray, C., Véron, J. (eds) International Handbook of Population and Environment. International Handbooks of Population, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76433-3_16

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