Climate-Related Disasters May Empower Rural Poor

Kendra McSweeney, associate professor of geography and co-author of a new study, suggests that climate-related weather disasters may provide opportunities for the rural poor to improve their lives.

McSweeney and her colleagues found that that the poorest inhabitants of a village in northeastern Honduras increased their land wealth and their share of earnings relative to more wealthy residents after Hurricane Mitch devastated their village in 1998. The findings offer a glimmer of hope from widespread concerns that the world's poor will suffer the most from shocks created by global climate change.

“Our study suggests that alternate outcomes are at least possible, and there may be ways for the poor to improve their situations if they are given the opportunity to come up with their own solutions,” said McSweeney. “The key for the people in this study was that, without outside interference, they were able to come up with a new method for how residents could own land – a necessity for survival in this rural, agriculture-based community.”

Read the Ohio State Research Office press release, http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/climatedisaster.htm