Title:

Exploring the Relationship between Poverty Levels and Typhoon Mortalities in the Philippines

The purpose of this project is to construct a mortality database that includes where and how people died during typhoons from 2004-2015. The next step is to find any relationships between the database and existing statistics available in the Philippines. The Philippines was selected for study because it is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, with meteorological events composing, on average, roughly a third of disasters. Climate change and shore modification have intensified the strength of typhoons and increased storms’ potential damage capacity. Studies on storm pathing in the region found storms forming closer to the Philippines and landing increasingly in the Visayas and Mindanao regions, which typically see fewer typhoons than other areas of the Philippines. These regions also contain some of the poorest and most populous areas of the Philippines. Of the studies reviewed that have looked at the correlations between poverty/economic development, all of them found that at both the national and subnational level, mortality rates are higher in less developed areas and countries. This study used situation reports produced by the Philippines government during disasters to map typhoon deaths and the number of people affected across the Philippines. These were then compared to poverty incidence rates of the corresponding administrative unit and year. No correlation was found using linear regression and semi-log plots while controlling for areas affected and population affected at the regional and provincial levels.

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