Document Type

Article

Date

5-2011

Keywords

tbd

Disciplines

Economics

Description/Abstract

Mitigating the negative welfare consequences of crises such as droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks, is a major challenge in many areas of the world, especially in highly vulnerable areas insufficiently equipped to prevent food and livelihood security crisis in the face of adverse shocks. Given the finite resources allocated for emergency response, and the expected increase in incidences of humanitarian catastrophe due to changing climate patterns, there is a need for rigorous and efficient methods of early warning and emergency needs assessment. In this paper we develop an empirical model, based on a relatively parsimonious set of regularly measured variables from communities in Kenya’s arid north, that generates remarkably accurate forecasts of the likelihood of famine with at least 3 months lead time. Such a forecasting model is a potentially valuable tool for enhancing early warning capacity.

Additional Information

This manuscript is from the Social Science Research Network, for more information see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1151355#192298

Source

Harvested from ssrn.com

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Included in

Economics Commons

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