AI Insight
This study used mobile phone data to track population movements in Pune, India, and Bandung, Indonesia following flood events, finding that less deprived neighborhoods experienced increases in phone presence while more deprived neighborhoods saw decreases. The pattern mirrors findings from high-income countries where wealthier communities recover faster from disasters. In Pune specifically, flooded deprived neighborhoods showed larger decreases in device presence compared to non-flooded deprived areas, though this interaction was not observed in Bandung.
Why it matters
The findings suggest that socioeconomic inequality shapes disaster recovery outcomes in rapidly urbanizing Global South cities similarly to high-income contexts, which has important implications for targeting post-disaster assistance and urban resilience planning. Understanding these mobility patterns can help policymakers identify vulnerable populations who may need additional support during and after flooding events.
Understand the Science
⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed
Dieser Artikel wurde noch nicht von unabhängigen Experten begutachtet. Die Ergebnisse sind vorläufig und sollten mit Vorsicht interpretiert werden.
Abstract: Disaster research in high-income settings shows that better-resourced communities see population inflows and faster recovery, while disadvantaged communities suffer prolonged population loss. Whether this pattern holds in rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South remains unclear. Here we show, using mobile phone data from Pune, India, and Bandung, Indonesia, how neighborhood-level changes in phone presence, a proxy for short-term population movement, relate to flooding and neighborhood deprivation. We combine satellite-derived flood maps with phone records to compare flooded and non-flooded areas over the 30 days around each flood. In both cities, less deprived neighborhoods see phone presence rise after flooding, while more deprived neighborhoods see it fall, consistent with resource-seeking interpretations documented in North American and European disaster research. The cities differed, however, in how deprivation relates to flood exposure: in Pune, more deprived flooded neighborhoods showed suggestive evidence of disproportionately larger decreases in detected device presence than similarly deprived non-flooded neighborhoods; no comparable interaction was observed in Bandung. Economic considerations are associated with post-flood device-presence changes in South and Southeast Asian cities in ways that parallel high-income contexts, though local context adds variation.
Source: Neighborhood Deprivation Shapes Post-Flood Population Losses in Pune and Bandung