By crossing satellite maps of floods and telephone data, researchers find in India and Indonesia the pattern observed in rich countries: the disadvantage weighs on recovery.
Studies of disasters in North America and Europe show that better-equipped neighbourhoods quickly return to their inhabitants, while the most disadvantaged ones lose their lives. A team wanted to check whether this was happening in cities in the South in the midst of urbanization, taking Pune, India, and Bandung, Indonesia.
The researchers combined satellite flood maps with the presence of mobile phones in each neighbourhood, an indicator of short-term population movements over the 30 days surrounding each flood. In both cities, the trend is the same: the presence of telephones increases after flooding in the least disadvantaged neighbourhoods and decreases in the poorest, suggesting that residents move to areas where resources are found.
The two cities diverge on one point: in Pune, the poor neighbourhoods actually flooded seem to lose even more presence than the poor neighbourhoods spared, an effect that does not appear in Bandung. For the authors, economic factors therefore play as in rich countries, but the local context greatly modulates their effects.
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