How natural hazards impact the social environment for vulnerable groups: an empirical investigation in Japan
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How natural hazards impact the social environment for vulnerable groups: an empirical investigation in Japan Maoxin Ye1 · Daniel P. Aldrich2 Received: 2 March 2020 / Accepted: 2 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Much research has demonstrated that vulnerable people fare more poorly than non-vulnerable ones in disasters and crises across a variety of outcomes—including mental and physical health, disaster aid received, re-housing processes, and overall satisfaction with recovery. But little is known about how natural hazards change the social and political environment for those vulnerable groups. Some have argued that shocks raise the consciousness of civil society and decision makers so that conditions improve for vulnerable groups, while others believe that disasters have little or even negative impact on their status in society. This paper uses a new panel dataset across 17 years (1999 through 2015) of Japan’s 47 prefectures to investigate how disasters impact discrimination rates for vulnerable groups, including women, the elderly, foreigners, and those with disabilities. Controlling for demographic and social factors, we find that disasters actually reduce discrimination against certain vulnerable groups—especially women and the elderly—while having no measurable impact on discrimination against other groups—foreigners and the disabled. These results bring with them important policy recommendations for local residents, disaster managers, and decision makers. Keywords Discrimination · Japan · Natural hazards · Social environment · Vulnerable groups
1 Introduction Natural hazards, including extreme weather events, flooding, and hurricanes, continue to take human lives and create high economic costs for societies around the world. Recent events have underscored the challenges created through the interaction of human habitation * Daniel P. Aldrich [email protected] Maoxin Ye [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, School of Humanities, Southeast University, 2 Southeast University Road, Jiangning District, Nanjing 211189, P.R. China
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Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University, Boston, USA
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Natural Hazards
and such threats. Extreme weather events displaced seven million people between January and July of 2019, a new record (New York Times 12 September 2019). Beyond natural hazards, man-made shocks have also generated large numbers of internally displaced people (IDPs). The nuclear power plant meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in March 2011, for example, forced more than 140,000 people from their homes and communities, with many still unable to return (Aldrich 2019). During crises and shocks of all kinds, vulnerable groups continue to suffer disparate levels of death, injury, and dislocation. Vulnerability revolves around the conditions which make individuals and communities more susceptible to negative outcomes during crisis and disaster. More specifically, it refers to the “
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