Education is essential not only for environmental protection and climate change mitigation but also for climate change adaptation. It may be even more important than income and wealth for reducing vulnerability to natural hazards. The higher the average level of education in a country, the fewer deaths due to disasters, even after income, life expectancy at birth, exposure to climate related risks, population density, the political system, the region and whether a country is landlocked are taken into account.
The importance of education for disaster resilience is valid for both slow and rapid onset cases. There are several potential causal mechanisms behind this. Learning basic reading, writing and abstraction skills raises the efficiency of cognitive processes and logical reasoning, thus enhancing cognitive capacity. Probably as a result, more educated people usually have better personal planning skills and are willing to change potentially risky behaviour. They are also more prepared for hazards because they tend to establish, for example, a family evacuation plan or stock pile emergency supplies. And they can access early warning systems and seasonal predictions more easily, which directly helps prevent fatalities.
Female education at a certain age, typically the childrearing years, is especially important in preventing disaster-related deaths as well as in building long-term resilience because of women’s active role in improving the overall quality of institutions and social networks for mutual assistance. In this sense there is a spillover effect that works through social interaction when members of a community benefit from their peers’ higher education levels, which can facilitate access to information and knowledge as well as to institutions that help reduce disaster risk. This is important because diverse forms of knowledge obtained from, for instance, social networks and boundary organizations can greatly reduce vulnerability through two-way communication, improving mitigation as well as adaptation.
Education also increases sociopsychological resilience. Better educated individuals affected by the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami were more able to cope with psychological stress in the long term. Better educated individuals were also less likely to live in camps or other temporary housing a few years after the tsunami, and they were economically more resilient. Other aspects of education that contribute to economic resilience include a wider set of skills among better educated individuals, which allows them to take up jobs in sectors other than agriculture, as well as easier access to certain resources due to social networks, including government financial assistance or informal loans from social networks.
