Skip to main content
NUTRITION 2023 Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Back

Topical Area: Climate, Food Systems, Diet, Nutrition and Health

Climate, Food Systems, Diet, Nutrition and Health (Poster Session)

(P02-027-23) Recurrent Flooding and Household Food Access in Central Java, Indonesia in 1984–2015

Saturday, July 22, 2023
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET
Location: Poster Board 362
Disclosure(s):
Breanne K. Langlois, PhD(c): No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.


Objectives: There is limited understanding of how recurring disasters shape household food access over time. We explored the effect of recurrent flooding on household food expenditure share using the Indonesian Family Life Survey over a span of 3 decades.

Methods: We linked the Global Surface Water Explorer dataset (GSWE) of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre to a household survey – the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS). GSWE is a global, high-resolution dataset measuring changes in the spatiotemporal distribution of surface water since 1984. IFLS is a health and economic survey of the Indonesian population with 5 waves throughout the 22-year span from 1993-2015. GSWE quantifies the inter-annual frequency with which surface water returns in a map called “recurrence”. Using version 1 of GSWE (1984-2015), we measured recurrent flooding as the fraction of raster cells within each district where water was present on an episodic basis with a recurrence value between 1 and 99. Due to the right skewness of the continuous measure, we created a binary variable describing presence versus absence of episodic flooding throughout the period for modelling. We used household food expenditure share captured in the IFLS as our measure of food access and outcome. We fit a multilevel, mixed-effects linear regression model adjusted for IFLS wave. Statistical modelling is ongoing to examine potential confounding factors and nonlinearity.

Results: Of 2,265 IFLS households in Central Java, 80% (1,820) lived in districts with seasonal or permanent water bodies and 18% (405) were located in dry districts where there was no surface water present throughout the period; overall, 42% (945) of households were in districts with episodic flooding. Households living in districts with episodic flooding had a greater food expenditure share compared to those in districts with no flooding (b=1.7, p=0.129).

Conclusions: Our initial model did not identify a significant linear relationship between recurrent flooding and greater household food expenditure share, indicating a more complex relationship or the adaptation effect. We plan for further exploration to uncover the form and shape of the relationship as well as the effect of other factors.

Funding Sources: USDA, National Institute of Food and Agriculture; NSF, US-Indonesian Research Experience for Students