VoxDev Development Economics S4 Ep37: How do floods impact economic development?
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Sep 18, 2024 Dev Patel, a Harvard development economist studying climate, flooding and remote sensing. He explains why Bangladesh is especially vulnerable. He describes creating near-daily flood maps with machine learning. He discusses how floods reshape local economies, agriculture and migration. He talks about using granular data to help farmers adapt with cheap, actionable salinity information.
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Floods Cause Long Lasting Economic Damage
- Floods reduce nighttime luminosity for at least seven years and shrink built-up area, indicating persistent economic and capital losses.
- Floods also push workers out of agriculture, increase internal household migration and raise school attendance post-event.
Failed Anticipatory Cash Pilot Due To Poor Training Data
- GiveDirectly partnered with Google to deliver anticipatory cash for Mozambique floods but predictions trained on river height data missed actual floods.
- Villages predicted to flood received cash but never flooded, while others flooded without cash, showing bad training data harms interventions.
Daily Flood Maps From Optical Plus Radar Machine Learning
- Patel combines optical satellites and radar with machine learning to get daily surface-water maps that overcome clouds and infrequent radar revisits.
- He trains optical-to-radar mappings so optical images with some cloud signal recreate high-quality radar water maps for daily flood detection.