The short and long-term effects of climate-induced disasters on school participation and learning in rural Indonesia

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Climate-induced disadvantage: The effect of extreme weather events and natural disasters on children’s educational outcomes in climate vulnerable countries

Proposal

Over the last two decades, children’s education in many parts of the world has been increasingly disrupted by a growing number of climate-induced disasters. In Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, natural disasters have nearly tripled over the last decade, exposing a rising number of children to climate-induced educational disruption. Varying in scale and type, disasters in Indonesia have resulted in damaged schools and educational infrastructure, unavailability of teachers, suspension of class, and inadequate learning environments. In addition, some studies highlight the harmful effects of repeated, smaller disasters as well as the ways in which effects vary for vulnerable communities and individuals.
We address each of these limitations by investigating the following questions: 1) What are the short-term and long-term effects of natural disasters on children’s education in rural Indonesia? 2) How do the effects vary by child gender, age, socioeconomic status, and region?

Drawing on both ecological models of development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and childhood resilience (Masten et al, 2007, we situate children as well as their exposure and resilience to climate-induced weather events within complex and interactive relationships at home, school, and in their villages. We also extend the conceptualization of the educational effects of climate events beyond participation to learning outcomes.

Methodologically, we used two waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey and a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effects of climate-induced, natural disasters on school participation and learning outcomes. The IFLS is a longitudinal survey representative of about 83% of the Indonesian population living in 13 provinces in the country. In addition to the extensive information collected on the individual- and household-level, the IFLS also surveys leaders of communities (villages or 3 townships) where individuals and households were interviewed. Another unique feature of the IFLS is that it administers a cognitive test assessing general cognitive and mathematics skills of respondents aged 7 and above. Disaster information is collected by the community questionnaire, which asks the informant to report any natural disasters (flood, earthquake, landslide, volcano eruption, tsunami, drought, forest fire, or fire) that occurred in the village in the last five years. To estimate the effect of exposure to natural disasters on educational outcomes, we employed a difference-in-differences framework comparing communities that experience disasters with those that do not. Specifically, we used a sample of 54 villages that reported no natural disasters in the last 5 years in the IFLS5 survey as our control group. The assumption is that, in the absence of natural disasters, the trend in education outcomes is similar between communities in the control and the treatment groups.

Established educational inequalities taken together with the frequency and variety of disasters, make Indonesia an illustrative case for an investigation of the short-term, long-term, and heterogeneous effects of disasters on children’s education. Findings from our study, which demonstrate the salient role of climate events in children’s lives and differential impact on educational outcomes, will help inform policies and practices to promote learning continuity and recovery for children.in Indonesia and around the world.

Authors

• Jennifer H Adams, Johns Hopkins University, School of Education

• Shuang Chen, Princeton University