Thread by @moyerjonathan

Our new research sheds light onto the impact of conflict in Yemen.

The conflict has set back development in Yemen by 21 years.

One child dies because of the conflict every 12 minutes.

This thread introduces the report findings:

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Today, nearly 60% of the population live in extreme poverty. 2/3 of those in extreme poverty are there because of armed conflict. There are an additional 44 million years of people living in extreme poverty because of the conflict.
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50% of the child population is undernourished. Of these, approximately 7 in 10 are undernourished because of the conflict. 1.6 additional years of children living in malnutrition are caused by the conflict.
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The economic costs of conflict are also massive. From 2015 through 2019, the conflict has reduced economic output by nearly $90 billion dollars and GDP per capita (at PPP) by $2,000.
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Mortality from conflict can be direct or indirect. Direct mortality are those killed in fighting. Indirect mortality are those that die as a result of the impacts of conflict, like increased poverty, malnutrition, and destroyed infrastructure.
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We estimate that, between 2015 and the end of 2019, that 100,000 people will die directly (this is one of our model assumptions).

But indirect deaths exceed direct, with 130,000 people dying due to lack of access to food and infrastructure.

60% of deaths are indirect.
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And the majority of these deaths are children. Since 2015, the conflict has killed 140,000 children from violence, malnutrition, disease, and reduced family income.
In 2019, a child dies every 12 minutes from conflict (both direct and indirect).

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If the conflict continues, the burden of suffering is increasingly on the youngest.

If the conflict continues through 2022, we estimate that 330,000 children will die, that the share of mortality will increasingly be indirect.
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How were these estimates calculated? Our research team (made up of @dkbohl, Taylor Hanna, @mapesbrendan, @MickSez) created two scenarios in the @pardeecenterifs model representing a continuation of conflict and a de-escalation of conflict, starting in 2015.
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This allows us to control for the development milieu in Yemen prior to the conflict. (That counter-factual scenario showed that Yemen was not going to achieve any #SDG by 2030 even without conflict.)
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We added a representation of the relationship between conflict and development across multiple dimensions to a model called International Futures. We populated the conflict scenario with data estimates taken from a range of sources.
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We created a conflict scenario that represented ongoing mortality and impact on GDP as represented by graphs below. We assumed that the severity of conflict reduced across time—conservative assumptions.
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Download the report here: ye.undp.org/content/yemen/…