Title: Natural hazards and internal migration in Bangladesh: The role of transient versus permanent shocks.
Abstract: We examined whether floods and cyclones, which can be considered as transient shocks, affect inter-regional migration differently compared to riverbank erosion that causes loss of lands and thus generates shocks that are permanent in nature. For our investigation, we tracked the 2000 Household Income and Expenditure Survey participants in nine coastal districts in Bangladesh and collected further information in 2015. We model migration on natural disasters and a range of household level variables. Our findings suggest that both transient and permanent shocks induce households to move to nearby cities but the effect is much higher for the latter category. Comparing income and expenditure of migrant- and non-migrant households in a matched difference-in-differences setting, we find that the former group is better-off relative to their counterparts, indicating that welfare can be improved by facilitating migration. Rising exposure to climate change induced natural disasters around the world imply that our findings will be increasingly relevant for designing policies to address vulnerability in disaster-prone countries with weak social safety nets.…
The Sustainability Expo has been moved to the fall!
This new time frame allows us to align the event with Notre Dame’s annual Career Fair, which provides a unique opportunity for employers and other participants to engage with students interested in energy, the environment, climate change, sustainability studies, and more. …
“Research Uncorked” is a monthly speaker series at Ironhand co-hosted with Notre Dame and featuring casual talks by leading scholars and scientists from the university. In September, we’re pleased to welcome Jennifer Tank, Galla Professor of Biological
Sciences and director of the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative, which includes the globally unique ND-LEEF research facility at St. Patrick’s County Park. …
Title: Turbulence and hurricanes: Using simulations to look where experiments can't.
Abstract: In the environment, air and water transport a wide variety of constituents, including nutrients, pollution, droplets, aerosols, dust, and even bugs. Predicting where these things end up, and in what abundance, is a difficult enterprise; this difficulty impacts a huge range of scientific disciplines, and in some ways limits our ability to predict future environmental conditions. In particular, turbulent motions, where the fluid motion is unsteady, chaotic, and unpredictable, are a highly nonlinear phenomena but form the foundation on which environmental transport is based. Making matters worse, often it is hazardous or simply impossible to observe these motions in nature or recreate them in the laboratory. This talk will provide an overview of recent efforts to use powerful numerical simulations to fill in many of the gaps associated with turbulent transport in the environment, including hurricane dynamics and hyporheic exchange in a river. Setting up and executing carefully designed numerical simulations allows us to better characterize the underlying processes and physics that govern motions in the atmosphere and ocean.…
Jason Rohr, Ph.D., Ludmilla F., Stephen J., and Robert T. Galla College Professor of Biological Sciences
Learn about the Rohr’ lab’s work to more fully account for the benefits of drugs to treat the five major worm infections of humans and to address the devastating disease schistosomiasis in Africa while simultaneously increasing water access and food and energy production.…
