any education (Hill and Mejia-Mantilla, 2017). Similarly, in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, children whose mothers have at least completed primary education do not suffer from stunting as a result of droughts, unlike those whose mothers have no formal education or did not complete primary education (Dimitrova, 2021; Le and Nguyen, 2022).

Furthermore, access to a minimum level of education emerges as a crucial factor across various contexts in determining a household’s ability to switch livelihood. Being educated increases the ability of households to access information and to be able to make informed decisions about the alternative livelihood strategies to try and smooth their income (Reardon, 1997; Ellis, 1998; Barrett, Reardon, and Webb, 2001; Abdulai and CroleRees, 2001; Wouterse and Taylor, 2008; Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo, 2011; van der Land and Hummel, 2013; Liu and Yamauchi, 2014; Hummel, 2016). Recent research by Doberman (2023) shows that historical investments into primary education facilitated adaptation to climate change. People who received education during a large-scale primary schooling expansion in India in the mid-to-late 1990s moved away from agriculture in response to climate change.

The third dimension of inability to cope is access to public support. There is considerable evidence that cash transfers help households to manage shocks. Regular cash transfers to households protect household welfare during crises (de Janvry et al., 2006; Pega et al., 2017; Knippenberg and Hoddinott, 2019; Bottan, Hoffmann, and Vera-Cossio, 2021; Abay et al., 2023). Employment guarantee schemes also play a protective role (Gehrke, 2019; Gelb et al., 2021; Afridi, Mahajan, and Sangwan, 2022). Cash transfers provided in response to a disaster have significant short- and long-run welfare benefits (Del Carpio and Macours, 2010; Macours, Schady, and Vakis, 2012; Mansur, Doyle, and Ivaschenko, 2017; Aggarwal et al., 2020; Banerjee et al., 2020; Brooks et al., 2020; Ivaschenko et al., 2020; Menezes-Filho, Komatsu, and Rosa, 2021; Pople et al., 2021; Afridi, Mahajan, and Sangwan, 2022; Londoño-Vélez and Pablo, 2022).

In this exercise, due to data availability constraints, access to public support is measured by looking at whether households have access to social protection. Ideally, we would have data on whether a household would be covered by social protection in a crisis through social insurance or cash transfers. This could reflect information on who is covered by social insurance (even if not currently receiving any payments) or who could feasibly be reached through an adaptive social protection system (i.e. covered by a social registry and able to receive payments when scale-up rules are applied, see Bowen et al. 2020, World Bank 2021b). However, in the absence of this data, there is some evidence in favor of using information on current coverage, as support is more likely to be available in response to a disaster in places where pre-disaster coverage rates are high. The number of beneficiaries in newly announced social assistance programs during COVID was strongly correlated with the size of the existing social protection system before the crisis (World Bank, 2022c) as was the speed of the response (see, for example, Gentilini et al 2022; Beazley, Marzi, and Steller, 2021).

The final dimension of inability to cope is access to financial services. There is a strong body of evidence showing that households borrow after a disaster to meet basic consumption needs, and transfers of money between family and friends in the aftermath of a disaster are also central to household risk management. Transfers between family and friends is also the most commonly reported way of households financing an emergency (Demirguc-Kunt et al. 2015).

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