Relationships between typhoons, climate and crime rates in Taiwan Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 2017, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. The literature indicates climate change is likely to cause more frequent and intense extreme weather events along with higher temperatures and altered precipitation. Taiwan frequently suffers from extremes in the form of typhoons, and their effects threaten both social stability and public security. Temperature effects through climate change are also expected to alter crime rates. We examine the immediate and longer-run impacts of typhoons and other climate variables on crime rates in Taiwan. The immediate results suggest that typhoon intensity has a significantly negative influence on rates of crime, including all violent crimes and automobile thefts. They also show that warmer temperatures have a strong positive effect on all violent crimes and all the subtypes of violent crimes. In addition, longer duration typhoons increase the immediate rates of all violent crimes, automobile thefts and muggings while decreasing the rate of burglaries. In the long run, we find that typhoon intensity, duration and landfall have persistent, lagged effects on crime that vary from negative to positive. For example, strong-intensity typhoons have significantly negative lagged effects on crimes 35months in the future but positive lagged effects on crimes in future months 69. Finally, projections under the IPCC climate change scenarios show all violent crimes will increase.

published proceedings

  • NATURAL HAZARDS

altmetric score

  • 14

author list (cited authors)

  • Yu, C., Mu, J. E., Ding, J., & McCarl, B. A.

citation count

  • 6

complete list of authors

  • Yu, Chin-Hsien||Mu, Jianhong E||Ding, Jinxiu||McCarl, Bruce A

publication date

  • November 2017