Evaluating the impact of Hazelwood mine fire event on students’ educational development with Bayesian interrupted time series hierarchical meta-regression

Abstract

Background Climate disasters such as wildfires, floods and droughts can introduce significant interruptions and trauma to impacted communities. Children and young people can be disproportionately affected with additional educational disruptions. However, evaluating the impact of disasters is challenging due to difficulties in establishing studies and recruitment post-disasters. Objectives With the increasing threat of climate change, we aimed to (1) establish a new analytical framework to evaluate the impact of climate disasters on academic achievement and (2) evaluate the impact of the 2014 Hazelwood mine fire (a six-week fire event in Australia). Methods Bayesian hierarchical meta-regressi..