Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Research Highlight
  • Published:

NATURAL DISASTERS

Unequal exposure

Nature Climate Change volume 8, page 359 (2018)Cite this article

Subjects

Environ. Dev. Econ. http://doi.org/cm9p (2018)

Hessel Winsemius from Deltares and Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and colleagues provide a new global assessment of the extent to which poor people are disproportionately exposed to river floods and droughts. The authors construct a poverty exposure bias measure — the fraction of poor people exposed to floods and droughts compared to the fraction of all people exposed in a country — by combining georeferenced household survey data with hydrological riverine flood and drought maps for 52 countries. Historically, they find that in most countries, poor people are overexposed to droughts and urban floods, but not rural floods. Under a high-emissions climate change scenario, they find that overall future exposure increases, but there is no change in the exposure bias.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nature Climate Change https://www.nature.com/natureclimatechange

    Adam Yeeles

Authors
  1. Adam Yeeles
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Adam Yeeles.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Yeeles, A. Unequal exposure. Nature Clim Change 8, 359 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0166-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Version of record:

  • Issue date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0166-1

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing