While the effect of agriculture on inequality outcomes is an equalizing one, its future growth, and that of agricultural livelihoods, is threatened by vulnerability to risks such as natural disasters and environmental degradation, exacerbated through climate change (Kozel, 2014). Kozel (2014) goes on to argue the continuous precarity of poor households against economy-wide shocks (such as the effect of climate change on rainfall and temperatures) but also highlights the danger of vulnerable households falling into poverty through generated inequalities. Looking at the particularities of flood risk management in the Ninh Binh province, Mottet and Roche (2009) find that most areas within the region are vulnerable. They find the strengths of current management lying in prevention with existing dykes designed to channel high waters, effective monitoring of weather conditions (rainfall or typhoons) and consolidation or elevation of existing residences, while the weaknesses are mainly centered around insufficient information given to inhabitants over flood risks, few compensation systems for flood victims and construction policies continuing to allow building in flood-endangered zones. Sen et al. (2021) estimate that the main barriers to better information are farmers’ lack of trust toward formal climate-related services, their lack of perceived risk from climate change itself and difficulties in balancing both climate adaptation and economic benefits of interventions. They argue that, while ethnicity itself is not a barrier to information access with all farmers receiving information through informal channels — friends neighbors and market actors instead of agricultural departments or mass media — cultural issues such as language do come into play and act as a barrier. Reactionary economic mitigation efforts by households, such as reduced healthcare spending, selling of land or livestock assets, taking children out of school due to needing assistance at home can in turn lead to longer-term adverse consequences (thus, mal-adaptation) (Kozel, 2014).
-The results are further intensification of inequality along existing social lines during extreme events such as flooding: The effects of inequalities mainly affecting ethnic minorities are illustrated by Son and Kingsbury (2020), with droughts impacting yield losses between 50% and 100%, cold snaps leading to loss of livestock and floods damaging residential structures but even more importantly disrupting livelihoods through landslides, crop destruction and overflowing fish ponds. Locally employed coping strategies, they argue, are always conditional on the strength and foresight of institutions and implemented preventative policies along local but also regional and central levels. Similarly, Ylipaa et al. (2019) analyze impacts mainly across the gender dimension to find that, resulting inequalities may be exacerbated with differentiated rights and responsibilities leading to unequal opportunities and, especially, decreased female mobility in turn increasing their vulnerability to climate impacts with a reduced capacity to adapt. Hudson et al. (2021) along the same dimension find that, while the set of relevant variables is largely similar with age, social capital, internal and external support after the flood and the perceived severity of previous flood impacts having major impacts, women tend to show longer recovery times and psychological variables can influence recovery rates more than some adverse flood impacts.
While the quantitative evidence for impacts of such shock events are relatively sparse, Jafino et al. (2021) lament the overuse of aggregate perspectives, instead disaggregating the local and inter-sectoral effects to find out that flood protection efforts in the Mekong Delta often predominantly support large-scale farming while small-scale farmers can be harmed through them. They find that measures decrease the aggregate total output and equity indicators by disaggregating profitability indicators into inundation, sedimentation, soil fertility, nutrient dynamics, behavioral land-use in an assessment which sees within-sector policy responses often having an effect on adjacent sectors, increasing the inter-district Gini coefficient. Adaptation during these catastrophic events reinforces the asset and endowment drivers of non-shock event times, with impacts levels often depending on access to non-farm income sources, access to further arable land, knowledge of adaptive farming practices and mitigation of possible health risks such as water contamination (Son & Kingsbury, 2020). Karpouzoglou et al. (2019) make the point that, ultimately, the pure coupling of flood resilience into infrastructural or institutional interventions needs to take care not to amplify existing inequalities through unforeseen consequences (‘ripple effects’) which can’t be escaped by vulnerable people due to their existing immobility.
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