Person:
Hallegatte, Stephane
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Green growth,
Climate change,
Urban development
Degrees
ORCID
Departments
Climate Change Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Stéphane Hallegatte is a lead economist with the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) at the World Bank. He joined the World Bank in 2012 after 10 years of academic research in environmental economics and climate science for Météo-France, the Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement, and Stanford University. His research interests include the economics of natural disasters and risk management, climate change adaptation, urban policy and economics, climate change mitigation, and green growth. Mr. Hallegatte was a lead author of the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is the author of dozens of articles published in international journals in multiple disciplines and of several books, including Green Economy and the Crisis: 30 Proposals for a More Sustainable France, Risk Management: Lessons from the Storm Xynthia, and Natural Disasters and Climate Change: An Economic Perspective. He also co-led the World Bank reports Inclusive Green Growth: The Pathway to Sustainable Development, published in 2012 and Decarbonizing Development in 2015, and was member of the core writing team of the 2014 World Development Report Risk and Opportunity: Managing Risks for Development. Most recently, he led the World Bank report Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty, published in 2015 just before the Paris conference on climate change. He was the team leader for the World Bank Group Climate Change Action Plan, a large internal coordination exercise to determine and explain how the Group will support countries in their implementation of the Paris Agreement. Mr. Hallegatte holds engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and the Ecole Nationale de la Météorologie (Toulouse), a master's degree in meteorology and climatology from the Université Paul Sabatier (Toulouse) and a Ph.D in economics from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris).
Publication Search Results
1 - 7 of 7
-
Publication
Integrating Climate Change and Natural Disasters in the Economic Analysis of Projects: A Disaster and Climate Risk Stress Test Methodology
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)To maximize development gains, World Bank projects must consider climate change and disaster risks in their design and appraisal. Buildings could be exposed to heat waves, roads might be vulnerable to floods, and agricultural practices may be subject to drought and pests. Although projects can be simultaneously vulnerable to several such risks, in most cases, it is possible to design and implement projects that are resilient to future climate change and natural risks. Doing so, however, requires these risks to be considered at each step of the project cycle. To select the best projects and ensure they deliver as expected, it is important to ensure that all project appraisal and assessment processes including economic analyses properly consider all risks. This guidance note proposes a simple methodology for doing this by adding a stress test for climate change and natural disasters to the economic analysis of a project. -
Publication
Building Back Better: Achieving Resilience through Stronger, Faster, and More Inclusive Post-Disaster Reconstruction
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06-18)The 2017 Unbreakable report made the case that disaster losses disproportionately affect poor people. The Caribbean hurricane season of 2017 was a tragic illustration of this. Two category 5 hurricanes wreaked destruction on numerous small islands, causing severe damages on islands like Barbuda, Dominica, and Saint Martin. The human cost of these disasters was immense, and the impact of this devastation was felt most strongly by poorer communities in the path of the storms. And yet, amidst the destruction it is essential to look forward and to build back better. In this 2018 report the authors explore how countries can strengthen their resilience to natural shocks through a better reconstruction process. Reconstruction needs to be strong, so that assets and livelihoods become less vulnerable to future shocks; fast, so that people can get back to their normal life as early as possible; and inclusive, so that nobody is left behind in the recovery process. The benefits of building back better could be very large – up to US$173 billion per year globally – and would be greatest among the communities and countries that are hit by disasters most intensely and frequently and that have limited coverage of social protection and financial inclusion. Small island states – because of their size, exposure, and vulnerability – are among the countries where building back better has the greatest potential. A stronger, faster, and more inclusive recovery would lead to an average reduction in disaster-related well-being losses of 59 percent in the 17 small island states covered in the report. -
Publication
From A Rocky Road to Smooth Sailing: Building Transport Resilience to Natural Disasters
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)Reliable transport infrastructure is one of the backbones of a prosperous economy, providingaccess to markets, jobs and social services. Sustainable Development Goal 9 (SDG9) calls forincreased access to sustainable transport infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries.Collectively, these countries will need to spend between 0.5 percent and 3.3 percent of their GDPannually (157 billion to 1 trillion US Dollars) in new transport infrastructure by 2030 – plus an additional 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP to maintain their network – depending on their ambition and their efficiency in service delivery (Rozenberg and Fay, 2019). Because of the wide spatial distribution of transport infrastructure, many transport assets are exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards, increasing costs for national transport agencies and operators. During the 2015 floods in Tbilisi, Georgia, the repair of transport assets contributed approximately 60 percent of the total damage cost (GFDRR, 2015). In the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, accessibility as measured by the length of open networks directly after the shock dropped by 86 percent for highways and by 71 percent for railways (Kazama and Noda, 2012b). Such transport disruptions necessarily have direct impacts on the local economy. Employees face difficulties commuting, access to firms is disrupted for clients, interruptions in the supply chain inhibit production, and finished products cannot be easily shipped (Kajitani and Tatano, 2014). The paper, prepared as background material for the Lifelines report on infrastructure resilience, summarizes the main findings on the risk faced by transport networks and users as a result of natural disasters and climate change, and the main recommendations for building more resilient transport networks. It starts by describing how transport disruptions affect firms and households either directly and through supply chains. It then proposes a range of approaches and solutions for building more resilient transport networks, showing that the additional cost of resilience is not high if resources are well spent. Finally, it provides a set of practical recommendations. -
Publication
Transportation and Supply Chain Resilience in the United Republic of Tanzania: Assessing the Supply-Chain Impacts of Disaster-Induced Transportation Disruptions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)The economy of the United Republic of Tanzania is growing fast but remains vulnerable to disasters, which are likely to worsen with climate change. Its transportation system, which mainly consist of roads, often get disrupted by floods. How could the resilience of the transportation infrastructures be improved? We formulate a new type of model, called DisruptSCT, which brings together the strength of two different approaches: network criticality analyses and input–output models. Using a variety of data, we spatially disaggregate production, consumption, and input–output relationships. Plugged into a dynamic agent-based model, these downscaled data allow us to simulate the disruption of transportation infrastructures, their direct impacts on firms, and how these impacts propagate along supply chains and lead to losses to households. These indirect losses generally affect people that are not directly hit by disasters. Their intensity nonlinearly increases with the duration of the initial disruption. Supply chains generate interdependencies that amplify disruptions for nonprimary products, such as processed food and manufacturing products. We identify bottlenecks in the network. But their criticality depends on the supply chain we are looking at. For instance, some infrastructures are critical to some agents, say international buyers, but of little use to others. Investment priorities vary with policy objectives, e.g., support health services, improve food security, promote trade competitiveness. Resilience-enhancing strategies can act on the supply side of transportation, by improving the quality of targeted infrastructure, developing alternative corridors, building capacity to accelerate post-disaster recovery. On the other hand, policies could also support coping mechanisms within supply chains, such as sourcing and inventory strategies. Our results help articulate these different policies and adapt them to specific contexts. -
Publication
Wading Out the Storm: The Role of Poverty in Exposure, Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods in Dar es Salaam
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-07-24)Dar es Salaam's economy and infrastructure suffers from frequent and severe flooding, and the situation will get worse in the absence of major interventions. In May of 2019, uninterrupted rainfall caused serious flooding in Dar es Salaam; 1,215 households were displaced, roads and bridges destroyed, and 1,560 dwellings were swept away. This disaster extends the growing list of flood events having struck the city in recent years. Dar es Salaam was affected by similar incidents in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, and seven floods alone impacted the city between 2017 and 2018. These events are a constant reminder of the urgency to address urban flood risk which causes major disruption to mobility, basic daily routines such as getting to work or school, and worse the diseases that dirty flood waters bring to affected communities. The health impacts can reverberate for months after flood waters subside, and without taking action now, flood risk and health hazards will further increase in the coming decades because of urban intensification. -
Publication
Best Investments for an Economic Recovery from Coronavirus: An Illustration Based on the Fiji Climate Vulnerability Assessment to Pinpoint Stimulus Options
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08-25)The COVID-19 crisis is causing massive suffering across the globe. In addition to the human consequences of the disease, containment measures to slow down and control the virus have deprived people of their livelihood and put many firms in a difficult financial situation. As a result, governments are planning massive stimulus packages to accelerate recovery once the health emergency is under control. To help governments think through investments for a green recovery, we proposed a sustainability checklist to screen potential projects and policies. To test how the sustainability checklist might work for a specific country, the checklist was applied to the Fiji Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA). The objective is to demonstrate how the checklist can be used as a screening, scoring, and prioritization tool to identify projects that create synergies between short-term needs and long-term objectives. -
Publication
Adaptation Principles: A Guide for Designing Strategies for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-17)Effective action on resilience and climate change adaptation can be a complex task—requiring coordinated efforts from the highest levels of government to individual households and firms. The Adaptation Principles offer a guide to effective climate change adaptation, containing hands-on guidance to the design, implementation and monitoring of national adaptation strategies. It specifies six guiding principles, which correspond to common policy domains: 1) Ensuring resilient foundations through rapid and inclusive development; 2) Facilitating the adaptation of firms and people; 3) Adapting land use and protecting critical public assets and services; 4) Increasing people’s capacity to cope with and recover from shocks; 5) Anticipating and managing macroeconomic and fiscal risks; 6) Ensuring effective implementation through prioritization and continuous monitoring. While outlining these universal Adaptation Principles, this guide shows that each country needs to tailor these actions to its specific needs and priorities. To guide this process, Adaptation Principles offers concrete and practical tools: Screening questions to identify the most urgent and effective actions, toolboxes illustrating common datasets and methodologies to support decisions, indicators to monitor and evaluate progress, and case studies on how the COVID-19 pandemic influences priorities in taking effective adaptation action.