A Global Analysis of Maternal Mortality and Natural Disasters: What Do We Have to Look Forward to?

Blake Erhardt-Ohren, University of California, Berkeley
Cara Schulte, University of California, Berkeley
Ndola Prata, Bixby Center for Population Health and Sustainability, UC Berkeley

Over the last fifty years, the world experienced a surge in natural disasters, in part due to climate change. Natural disasters can have severe and adverse impacts on health, including sexual and reproductive health. A significant proportion of maternal deaths, specifically, occur in humanitarian settings, including those affected by natural disasters. To our knowledge, however, there does not exist any study that has attempted to quantify the association between maternal death and natural disasters at the global scale – and only one study has attempted to do so in a local context. Our study is thus the first to explore the global impact of natural disasters on maternal mortality. Using publicly available disaster, demographic and health survey data, we run both crude and multivariate models to produce data on this association for individual countries, regions, and globally. We control for armed conflict, non-natural or alternative disasters, and sociodemographic characteristics. We also run sensitivity analyses based upon disaster class, buffer zones, and temporal bounds. Quantifying the impacts of natural disasters on maternal mortality provides a clearer picture of climate-related threats to health. This data lays a critical foundation that we hope will influence additional research, funding, and effective interventions in this field.

Keywords: Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Geo-referenced/geo-coded data, Population, Shocks and Pandemics

See extended abstract.