Identifying cumulative consequences of recurrent flooding in Nepal

Climate change is linked to more intense rainfall leading to more frequent flooding, but we do not understand how populations, especially rural populations, who are repeatedly exposed to such flooding are impacted over the long run. The gap in understanding of the long-term consequences of recurrent flooding on rural populations is partly due to how disasters are quantified and aggregated, where governments often report large disasters that occur in urban areas and cause greater direct losses.

Our project will approach the challenge of understanding the long-term, cumulative impacts of recurrent flooding associated with climate change on rural populations through a multilevel convergencebased framework that leverages social science-based methods to inform engineering research, and vice versa. Importantly, the proposed research will facilitate our understanding of the long-term consequences of recurrent flooding on rural populations, filling gaps in our understanding of the effects of climate-induced hazards on rural populations who are often viewed as less resilient due to less access to resources.

This project is funded by the University of Michigan Pilot Project Grants for the Study of Rural Contexts.