A Large Undocumented Mortality Burden Caused by the Tropical Cyclone Climate of the United States
Dr. Hsiang's research combines insights from the natural and and physical sciences with econometric techniques to understand the human impact of environmental changes. He will be presenting new work quantifying the health consequences of hurricanes in the U.S.
—Kyle Meng, Associate Professor, Bren School
Dr. Hsiang will be presenting remotely. Join online using this link and passcode climate or watch the remote talk in Bren Hall 1414
ABSTRACT
Joint with Rachel Young (Princeton)
Natural disasters trigger complex chains of events within human societies. Immediate deaths and damage may be directly observed post-disaster and are widely studied, but delayed downstream outcomes that are indirectly caused by the disaster are difficult to trace back to the initial event. Hurricanes and tropical storms, known together as tropical cyclones (TCs), are widespread globally and understood to have lasting impact on economic outcomes, but the full health impact of the TC climate remains unknown. We conduct the first large-scale evaluation of long-term TC impacts on human mortality in the contiguous United States (CONUS) for all TCs between 1930-2015. We discover a robust but heretofore unreported rise in excess mortality that persists for fifteen years after each of these geophysical events (p≤0.012). We estimate that the average TC contributes to 7,000-11,000 excess deaths, exceeding the 24 immediate deaths officially attributed to an average TC by US government agencies. Tracking the individual impact of 501 historical storms, we compute that the TC climate of CONUS imposes an undocumented ongoing mortality burden that explains a substantial fraction of the elevated mortality rates along the Atlantic coast and is equal to roughly 3.2-5.1% of all deaths. These results indicate that the TC climate is an important underlying driver for the distribution of mortality risk in CONUS, especially among infants, ages 1-44 and the Black population. These findings suggest that the TC climate, previously thought to be unimportant for broader public health outcomes, should be a focus of research and policy intervention for vulnerable populations. Understanding why TCs induce long-term excess mortality is an unstudied problem that may yield substantial health benefits.
BIO
Solomon Hsiang directs the Global Policy Laboratory at Berkeley, where his team is integrating econometrics, spatial data science, and machine learning to answer questions that are central to managing global resources.
Hsiang earned a BS in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science and a BS in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he received a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Applied Econometrics at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University.
Hsiang is currently the Thomas and Alison Schneider Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, a Co-Director at the Climate Impact Lab, co-founder of mosaiks.org, Research Associate at the NBER, and a National Geographic Explorer. Hsiang is currently the Lead Author of the Economics chapter for the Fifth National Climate Assessment.