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Confronting Droughts with a Simple Technology

, by Fabio Todesco
Diogo Britto has been awarded a grant by the International Growth Center for a project on the effects of climate shocks on children in Brazil

Billions of individuals around the world experience water scarcity and changing climate conditions will likely exacerbate this critical issue. Diogo Britto, a Post Doc Researcher affiliated to Bocconi's Baffi-CAREFIN's CLEAN research unit, has been awarded a Full Research Grant by the International Growth Center (IGC), for a research project that tackles this issue.

The project Climate shocks and the effectiveness of scalable, low-cost climate adaption policies, joint with Breno Sampaio (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco), will study the consequences of climate shocks focusing on children's long-term outcomes, and will provide novel evidence on the effectiveness of climate adaptation policies improving water supply to households.

"In the first part of the project, we will present unique comprehensive evidence on the long-term impacts of droughts on children: the consequences of being exposed to these shocks along several dimensions (including education employment, health, mortality, migration, entrepreneurship, and crime) and how heterogeneous are the effects across gender, race, education, and socioeconomic conditions," Dr. Britto said.

In the second part, Britto and Sampaio will study the effectiveness of the Cisterns program, a policy providing one million cisterns in a Brazilian region historically affected by recurring droughts. "This is a low-cost technology consisting of a water tank installed in each household. It collects rainfall, thus creating a large water supply which is enough for a family to live throughout the drought season without the need to constantly search for water," Dr. Britto explained.

IGC is a global research center with a network of researchers, country teams across Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, and a set of global policy initiatives. Based at LSE and in partnership with the University of Oxford, it is majority funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Its research focuses on sustainable growth policies in developing countries.

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