Archive Detail

Speaker:
Halvard Buhaug

Societal impacts from extreme climate and weather events depend not only on the magnitude of the hazard but also on the vulnerability of exposed societies. Existing research suggests that adverse socioeconomic conditions are associated with higher baseline vulnerability to many types of risk, but comparably little attention has been devoted to understanding political drivers of vulnerability. Studying floods, the most frequent climate-related hazard, this paper offers a comprehensive quantitative evaluation of how various dimensions of political development – democracy, institutional quality, and peace – affect flood mortality at global scale, 2000-2018. Results show that all three political dimensions matter for flood vulnerability. Breakdown of peace, in particular, is found to aggravate flood impacts, pointing to the important role of conflict resolution and peacebuilding in facilitating disaster risk reduction and sustainability.

Halvard Buhaug is Research Director and Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Associate Editor of the Journal of Peace Research. His research interest lie in the fields of peace research, civil war, armed conflict, political geography, environmental security and security dimensions of climate change. His research is funded by the European Union, the World Bank, the US Department of Defense, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.