The impact of flooding disruption on the spatial distribution of commuter's income

ABSTRACT

Flooding already imposes substantial costs to the economy. Costs are expected to rise in future, both as a result of changing weather patterns due to climate change, but also because of changes in exposure to flood risk resulting from socio-economic trends such as economic growth and urbanisation. Existing cost estimates tend to focus on direct damages, excluding potentially important indirect effects such as disruptions to transport and other essential services. This paper estimates the costs to commuters as a result of travel disruptions caused by a flooding event. Using Galway, Ireland as a case study, the commuting travel times under the status quo and during the period of the floods and estimated additional costs imposed, are simulated for every commuter. Results show those already facing large commuting costs are burdened with extra costs with those in rural areas particularly vulnerable. In areas badly affected, extra costs amount to 39% of earnings (during the period of disruption), while those on lower incomes suffer proportionately greater losses. Commuting is found to have a regressive impact on the income distribution, increasing the Gini coefficient from 0.32 to 0.38.

KEYWORDS:

• Flooding
• climate change
• transport disruptions
• micro-simulation

JEL CODES:

• Q54
• R11
• R41

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Mark Conroy (Galway County Council) for helping us source the flooded roads data used in this analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Paul Kilgarriff http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1148-0519

Notes

1. http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/ireland-and-northern-ireland.html

2. See Appendix Table A1.

3. Five road classes are included in the model; Motorway, National Primary, National Secondary, Regional and Local. Where road class is missing, road is labelled local road.

4. https://data.gov.ie/dataset/floodedroadsdec2015

5. https://data.gov.ie/dataset/galway-county-roads-networkc9c86

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland under the EPA Research Programme 2014–2020 (project code 2015-CCRP-DS.10), and forms part of a larger research project, based at UCC and in collaboration with the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, which aims to estimate costs of climate impacts for Ireland and explore policy responses for managing climate risks, with a particular focus on the issue of flooding.