ASDI Grant 2020 awarded to study the impact of climate change adaptation on poverty traps
Periodic disasters such as epidemics and flooding can create conditions that make it difficult for vulnerable and marginalized groups to escape poverty. Rapid urbanization and climate change exacerbate overall hazard risks, putting the (re)distribution of climate risks and the escalation of inequality due to climate change at the top of scientific and policy agendas. Yet, decision-support tools that capture feedbacks between the uneven geography of hazards, the diversity of individual capacities to adapt and various resilience policy interventions are underdeveloped.
Closing the gap
The ASDI 2020 grant for the project ‘Computing societal dynamics of climate change adaptation in cities’ will address this gap and enables a unique collaboration among dr. Debraj Roy (Assistant Professor at the Computational Science Lab, University of Amsterdam), Prof. dr. Tatiana Filatova (TPM faculty at TU Delft), Prof. dr. Maarten van Aalst (ITC Faculty at the University of Twente, Director of the International Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre), and the Netherlands eScience Centre. The team will employ state-of-the-art computational and data analytics methods to advance knowledge and software tools on the interplay of poverty traps and climate change adaptation in hazard-prone cities.
This research aims to develop methods that incorporate socioeconomic dynamics and provide new theoretical insights into social transitions. It will focus on the dynamic analysis of resilience and vulnerability to climate change of diverse groups of population, including marginalized communities in cities on the Global South. Towards this goal our team will apply advanced data mining methods to detect different behavioral regimes from social surveys, combine data with computational models of cities experiencing climate-driven hazards.
Decision support tool
The team will develop a reusable software that is accessible to a wide range of users and permits experts to trace socio-economic resilience to climate change. One of the outcomes of the project will a web-based decision-support tool for supporting of climate change adaptation accounting for societal feedbacks between adaptation and poverty traps. It is aimed at disaster risk managers to explore the aggregated impact of climate adaptation aimed at minimizing social costs of floods.
