How does climate change influence school attendance? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how tropical cyclones impacts schooling, specifically regarding the disaster recovery. This study has the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand non-environmental consequences of climate change and the steps that can be taken to mitigate them.
For the study, the researchers analyzed data from 5.4 million people across 13 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) who were impacted by tropical cyclones between 1954 and 2010, including Dominican Republic, Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Comoros, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, and Cambodia. The goal of the study was to ascertain how the tropical cyclones impacted the schooling of preschool-aged children (aged 5 or 6).
In the end, the researchers found that tropical cyclones contributed to a 2.5 percent decrease in the chance that preschool-aged children would start primary school on time, with LMICs that were unprepared for tropical cyclones seeing an 8.8 percent decrease.
“Education is key to personal development, but tropical cyclones are depriving vulnerable populations of the opportunity to go to school,” said Dr. Renzhi Jing, who is a postdoctoral scholar in the Stanford School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
This study comes as climate change continues to contribute to more severe and more frequent weather events, including increased temperatures, hurricanes, and tropical cyclones. Therefore, studies like this could demonstrate the ongoing non-environmental impacts of climate change and LMICs could be better prepared for tropical cyclones.
What new connections between climate change and school attendance will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, EurekAlert!