Person:
Hallegatte, Stéphane

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Green growth, Climate change, Urban development
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Last updated: February 13, 2024
Biography
Stéphane Hallegatte is a Senior Climate Change Adviser 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 reports Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty , Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters , and Lifelines: the Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity. 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).
Citations 2007 Scopus

Publication Search Results

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Wading Out the Storm: The Role of Poverty in Exposure, Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods in Dar es Salaam

2019-07-24, Erman, Alvina, Obolensky, Marguerite, Hallegatte, Stephane

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.

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Wading Out the Storm: The Role of Poverty in Exposure, Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods in Dar es Salaam

2019-08, Erman, Alvina, Tariverdi, Mercedeh, Obolensky, Marguerite, Chen, Xiaomeng, Vincent, Rose Camille, Malgioglio, Silvia, Rentschler, Jun, Hallegatte, Stephane, Yoshida, Nobuo

Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of assets or property) and indirect (losses involving health, infrastructure, labor, and education) impacts using household survey data. Poorer households are more likely to be affected by floods; directly affected households are more likely female-headed and have more insecure tenure arrangements; and indirectly affected households tend to have access to poorer quality infrastructure. Focusing on the floods of April 2018, affected households suffered losses of 23 percent of annual income on average. Surprisingly, poorer households are not over-represented among the households that lost the most - even in relation to their income, possibly because 77 percent of total losses were due to asset losses, with richer households having more valuable assets. Although indirect losses were relatively small, they had significant well-being effects for the affected households. It is estimated that households’ losses due to the April 2018 flood reached more than US$100 million, representing between 2-4 percent of the gross domestic product of Dar es Salaam. Furthermore, poorer households were less likely to recover from flood exposure. The report finds that access to finance play an important role in recovery for households.

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The Road to Recovery: The Role of Poverty in the Exposure, Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods in Accra

2018-06, Erman, Alvina, Motte, Elliot, Goyal, Radhika, Asare, Akosua, Takamatsu, Shinya, Chen, Xiaomeng, Malgioglio, Silvia, Skinner, Alexander, Yoshida, Nobuo, Hallegatte, Stephane

In June 2015, about 53,000 people were affected by unusually severe floods in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana. The real impact of such a disaster is a product of exposure ("Who was affected?"), vulnerability ("How much did the affected households lose?"), and socioeconomic resilience ("What was their ability to cope and recover?"). This study explores these three dimensions to assess whether poor people were disproportionally affected by the 2015 floods. It reaches four main conclusions. (1) In the studied area, there is no difference in annual expenditures between the households who were affected and those who were not affected by the flood. (2) Poorer households lost less than their richer neighbors in absolute terms, but more when compared with their annual expenditure level, and poorer households are over-represented among the most severely affected households. (3) More than 30 percent of the affected households report not having recovered two years after the shock, and the ability of households to recover was driven by the magnitude of their losses, sources of income, and access to coping mechanisms, but not by their poverty, as measured by the annual expenditure level. (4) There is a measurable effect of the flood on behaviors, under-mining savings and investment in enterprises. The study concludes with two policy implications. First, flood management could be considered as a component of the poverty-reduction strategy in the city. Second, building resilience is not only about increasing income. It also requires providing the population with coping and recovery mechanisms such as financial instruments. A flood management program needs to be designed to target low-resilience households, such as those with little access to coping and recovery mechanisms, even those who are not living in poverty before the shock.

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Floods and Their Impacts on Firms: Evidence from Tanzania

2021-09, Rentschler, Jun, Thies, Stephan, De Vries Robbe, Sophie, Erman, Alvina, Hallegatte, Stéphane

This study explores how businesses in Tanzania are impacted by floods, and which strategies they use to cope and adapt. These insights are based on firm survey data collected in 2018 using a tailored questionnaire, covering a sample of more than 800 firms. To assess the impact of disasters on businesses, the study considers direct damages and indirect effects through infrastructure systems, supply chains, and workers. While direct on-site damages from flooding can be substantial, they tend to affect a relatively small share of firms. Indirect impacts of floods are more prevalent and sizable. Flood-induced infrastructure disruptions—especially electricity and transport—obstruct the operations of firms even when they are not directly located in flood zones. The effects of such disruptions are further propagated and multiplied along supply chains. The study estimates that supply chain multipliers are responsible for 30 to 50 percent of all flood-related delivery delays. To cope with these impacts, firms apply a variety of strategies. Firms mitigate supply disruptions by adjusting the size and geographical reach of their supply networks, and by adjusting inventory holdings. By investing in costly backup capacity (such as water tanks and electricity generators), firms mitigate the impact of infrastructure disruptions. The study estimates that only 13 percent of firms receive government support in the aftermath of floods.