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Effects of a natural disaster on mortality risks over the longer term

Nature Sustainability volume 3, pages 614–619 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Exposure to disasters and other extreme events is rising across the globe, but the impact on long-term mortality risks of affected populations is not established. We examine how mortality and individual-specific traumatic exposures at the time of the disaster affect mortality risks of survivors over the subsequent ten years, using data from Aceh, Indonesia, collected before and after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Across communities, the higher the percentage of individuals killed in the tsunami, the lower the mortality rate for adults over the subsequent decade. However, among older adults post-disaster mortality is elevated for males with poor post-tsunami psychosocial health and for females whose spouse died in the tsunami. Individual-specific tsunami exposures do not affect the mortality of younger adults within the ten-year time frame. Whereas positive mortality selection is evident for all adults, scarring is evident only for older adults and is large enough to substantively counteract the reductions in risk from positive mortality selection.

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Fig. 1: Relationship between community-level tsunami mortality and percentage of tsunami survivors who died between 2005 and 2015.

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Data availability

The public-use STAR microdata are available at www.stardata.org. All data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (e.frankenberg@unc.edu) upon request.

Code availability

All programs that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health (grant numbers R01 AG031266 and R01 AG065395) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development at the National Institutes of Health (grant numbers R01 HD052762, R21 HD051970 and P2C HD050924), the National Science Foundation (grant number CMS-0527763), the World Bank, the Hewlett Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation (grant number 05-85158-000) and the Wellcome Trust (grant number 106853/A/15/Z).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Elizabeth Frankenberg

  2. SurveyMETER, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

    Cecep Sumantri

  3. Department of Economics, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Duncan Thomas

Authors
  1. Elizabeth Frankenberg
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  2. Cecep Sumantri
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  3. Duncan Thomas
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Contributions

All authors conceived the project. E.F. and D.T. conceptualized and conducted the analysis and wrote the paper. C.S. supervised data collection and contributed to interpretation of results.

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Correspondence to Elizabeth Frankenberg.

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Frankenberg, E., Sumantri, C. & Thomas, D. Effects of a natural disaster on mortality risks over the longer term. Nat Sustain 3, 614–619 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0536-3

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