Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Probability, Prediction and Decisions: A Pathway to the alleviation of poverty in the developing world

Peter J. Webster

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

During the last few years, radical economical ideas have been put forward to allow people to emerge out of poverty. Muhammad Yunis introduced the concept of micro-loans that “lend money to people who need the money (Yunis)” for which he received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics. Through this method, thousands of people in the less-developed world have slowly eased themselves from poverty and “now go from door to door selling things and not begging (Yunis)”. But there is a bigger problem that effect 10’s of millions of the poor each year: slow rise monsoon floods. These extremes visit Bangladeshis and Indians multiple times in a generation and are relentlessly impoverishing. After such events, loans still have to be repaid and the treadmill of poverty increases the slope of the treadmill of intergenerational poverty.

We ask a simple question. Is it possible that environmental predictions of natural hazards delivered to communities in the most effected regions can reduce the devastating economic social impacts? In parallel with Yunis, can the introduction of environmental hazard forecasts to those who need them at the village or union scale impart a reduction in poverty? We will discuss the results of a decade long experiment in Bangladesh where a scheme for the probabilistic prediction of floods out to 10-days has been developed and implemented. Since 2007, the system has been operational and attached to a warning system where communities are trained to use forecasts and take remedial actions ahead of flooding to reduce their impacts. Economic analyses show that communities that used the forecasts made savings in units of annual income.

Finally, we consider a warming world where flooding in South Asia is projected to become more frequent and intense. For example, the return time of Ganges and Brahmaputra extended 10-day flooding is expected to half during the next 50 years to every 3 years. We close with the conjecture that societies that learn to deal with current environmental hazards will be best equipped to deal with the greater risk of hazards in the future.

Peter Webster