Storms, floods, landslides associated with intimate partner violence against women two years later
October 14, 2024
Climate change-related landslides, storms and floods are associated with higher levels of partner violence, according to a study published Oct. 2 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate.

Dr. Abigail Hatcher
The study was led by Jenevieve Mannell, PhD, from University College London, in collaboration with colleagues from England, South Africa, and Abigail Hatcher, PhD, associate professor of health behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
Low- and middle-income countries are disproportionately impacted by climate change’s acute (e.g., flooding) and chronic (e.g., rising sea levels) effects. This paper extended global work to explore whether countries with climate shocks were more likely to observe increases in violence against women by a relationship partner.
Mannell and colleagues combined 363 nationally representative partner violence surveys from 156 countries with climate shock data from the Emergency Events Database. Their analysis accounted for several climate-related shocks: earthquakes, volcanoes, extreme temperatures, wildfires, droughts, landslides, storms and floods.
The researchers observed a lagged association between landslides, storms and floods, and partner violence. Lagged means that a climate shock in one year is tied to a measurable increase in partner violence two years later. This association held even after controlling for country-level economic strength through gross domestic product (GDP).
Surprisingly, the climate variable had a similar magnitude of effect on later partner violence as national GDP. This suggests that programs to mitigate the effect of climate events on relationships could one day be as helpful as raising national wealth.
Recent storms like Hurricane Helene, which devastated communities in western North Carolina and the southeastern United States, have highlighted that climate-related extreme weather poses a risk for everyone. “Yet, we are often more aware of the acute effects in the days following a climate event than long-run societal effects,” said Hatcher.
These results have implications for future funding to mitigate the health impacts of climate change. Recent work has shown the long-run effect of hurricanes and tropical storms on mortality – the death rates attributed to these climate events – is estimated to surpass road accidents, war and infectious disease combined.
Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@unc.edu.