Flood exposure decreases the likelihood of receiving formal education: evidence from 34 countries

Floods affected an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide over the past two decades, and their impacts are projected to increase with climate change and population growth. Emerging reports indicate that these events disrupt children’s education, a foundational determinant of lifelong health and economic outcomes, yet systematic cross-country evidence on the effects of floods on education remains limited. In this paper, we collate 2.8 million education records from 34 countries that experienced floods between 2000 and 2018 and link them to high-resolution flood footprints from the Global Flood Database to quantify the effects of flood exposure on schooling attainment. Exploiting the natural variation in exposure to flooding among people living in the city or neighbourhood, we use fixed-effects regression models to estimate the effect of flood exposure on the likelihood of receiving any formal schooling among children of school-enrolment age, adjusting for sex and wealth status. We find that exposure to floods at ages 5-6y corresponds to a 0.25 percentage-point increase (95% CI: 0.09-0.41) in the likelihood of having no formal education (a relative increase of 2.4%), with more pronounced effects among girls and children in the poorest household wealth quintile. This effect is comparable to other well-documented climate-related impacts on schooling, and our estimates are likely conservative. Across the 34 countries studied, we estimate that flooding prevented approximately 800,000 children from receiving any formal education between 2000 and 2018, 76% of whom were female. Our findings demonstrate that floods may be undermining global progress toward educational attainment and gender equality goals.