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 - 10 of 23
-
Publication
The Indirect Cost of Natural Disasters and an Economic Definition of Macroeconomic Resilience
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-07)The welfare impact of a disaster does not depend only on the physical characteristics of the event or its direct impacts in terms of lost lives and assets. Depending on the ability of the economy to cope, recover, and reconstruct, the reconstruction will be more or less difficult, and the welfare effects smaller or larger. This ability, which can be referred to as the macroeconomic resilience of the economy to natural disasters, is an important parameter to estimate the overall vulnerability of a population. Here, resilience is decomposed into two components: instantaneous resilience, which is the ability to limit the magnitude of the immediate loss of income for a given amount of capital losses, and dynamic resilience, which is the ability to reconstruct and recover quickly. The paper proposes a rule of thumb to estimate macroeconomic resilience, based on the interest rate (a higher interest rate decreases resilience and increases welfare losses), the reconstruction duration (a longer reconstruction duration increases welfare losses), and a “ripple-effect” factor that increases or decreases immediate losses (negative if enough idle resources are available to cope; positive if cross-sector and supply-chain issues impair the production of non-affected capital). An optimal risk management strategy is very likely to include measures to reduce direct impacts (disaster risk reduction actions) and measures to reduce indirect impacts (resilience building actions). -
Publication
Flood Protection and Land Value Creation: Not All Resilience Investments Are Created Equal
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07)This paper investigates the land value creation potential from flood mitigation investments in a theoretical and applied setting, using the urban area of Buenos Aires as a case study. It contributes to the literature on the wider economic benefits of government interventions and the dividends of resilience investments. Using a simple urban economics framework that represents land and housing markets, it finds that not all flood mitigation interventions display the same potential for land value creation: where land is more valuable (city centers for example), the benefits of resilience are higher. The paper also provides ranges for land value creation potential from the flood mitigation works in Buenos Aires under various model specifications. Although the estimates vary largely depending on model parameters and specifications, in many cases the land value creation would be sufficient to justify the investments. This result is robust even in the closed city configuration with conservative flood damage estimates, providing that the parameters remain reasonably close to the values obtained from the calibration. Finally, acknowledging that fully calibrating and running an urban simulation model is data greedy and time intensive—even a simple model as proposed here—this research also proposes reduced form expressions that can provide approximations for land value creation from flood mitigation investments and can be used in operational contexts. -
Publication
Higher Losses and Slower Development in the Absence of Disaster Risk Management Investments
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04)Global economic losses from natural disasters continue to increase. Yet, investments in disaster risk management are not universal, as they are traditionally seen as in competition with other development and economic priorities. The multitude of benefits from disaster risk management investments are not traditionally accounted for in cost-benefit analyses. This paper contributes to this discussion by highlighting the multiple benefits from disaster risk management investments, focusing on the avoided losses when a disaster occurs, but also on the impacts on economic development even before a disaster strikes. The paper's main message is that disaster risk management investments can provide two dividends: reduced losses when a disaster strikes, and a shift of investment strategies and perhaps even an increase in investment value that would benefit the economy even before a disaster strikes. Providing evidence to policy makers and investors about the existence of both types of dividends can provide a narrative reconciling short-term and long-term objectives, thereby improving the acceptability and feasibility of disaster risk management investments. -
Publication
Assessing Socioeconomic Resilience to Floods in 90 Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05)This paper presents a model to assess the socioeconomic resilience to natural disasters of an economy, defined as its capacity to mitigate the impact of disaster-related asset losses on welfare, and a tool to help decision makers identify the most promising policy options to reduce welfare losses due to floods. Calibrated with household surveys, the model suggests that welfare losses from the July 2005 floods in Mumbai were almost double the asset losses, because losses were concentrated on poor and vulnerable populations. Applied to river floods in 90 countries, the model provides estimates of country-level socioeconomic resilience. Because floods disproportionally affect poor people, each $1 of global flood asset loss is equivalent to a $1.6 reduction in the affected country's national income, on average. The model also assesses and ranks policy levers to reduce flood losses in each country. It shows that considering asset losses is insufficient to assess disaster risk management policies. The same reduction in asset losses results in different welfare gains depending on who benefits. And some policies, such as adaptive social protection, do not reduce asset losses, but still reduce welfare losses. Asset and welfare losses can even move in opposite directions: increasing by one percentage point the share of income of the bottom 20 percent in the 90 countries would increase asset losses by 0.6 percent, since more wealth would be at risk. But it would also reduce the impact of income losses on wellbeing, and ultimately reduce welfare losses by 3.4 percent. -
Publication
Disaster Risk, Climate Change, and Poverty: Assessing the Global Exposure of Poor People to Floods and Droughts
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-11)People living in poverty are particularly vulnerable to shocks, including those caused by natural disasters such as floods and droughts. Previous studies in local contexts have shown that poor people are also often overrepresented in hazard-prone areas. However, systematic evidence across countries demonstrating this finding is lacking. This paper analyzes at the country level whether poor people are disproportionally exposed to floods and droughts, and how this exposure may change in a future climate. To this end, household survey data with spatial identifiers from 52 countries are combined with present-day and future flood and drought hazard maps. The paper defines and calculates a “poverty exposure bias” and finds support that poor people are often overexposed to droughts and urban floods. For floods, no such signal is found for rural households, suggesting that different mechanisms—such as land scarcity—are more important drivers in urban areas. The poverty exposure bias does not change significantly under future climate scenarios, although the absolute number of people potentially exposed to floods or droughts can increase or decrease significantly, depending on the scenario and the region. The study finds some evidence of regional patterns: in particular, many countries in Africa exhibit a positive poverty exposure bias for floods and droughts. For these hot spots, implementing risk-sensitive land-use and development policies that protect poor people should be a priority. -
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
Are Losses from Natural Disasters More Than Just Asset Losses?: The Role of Capital Aggregation, Sector Interactions, and Investment Behaviors
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-11)The welfare impact of a natural disaster depends on its effect on consumption, not only on the direct asset losses and human losses that are usually estimated and reported after disasters. This paper proposes a framework to assess disaster-related consumption losses, starting from an estimate of the asset losses, and leading to the following findings. First, output losses after a disaster destroys part of the capital stock are better estimated by using the average—not the marginal—productivity of capital. A model that describes capital in the economy as a single homogeneous stock would systematically underestimate disaster output losses, compared with a model that tracks capital in different sectors with limited reallocation options. Second, the net present value of disaster-caused consumption losses decreases when reconstruction is accelerated. With standard parameters, discounted consumption losses are only 10 percent larger than asset losses if reconstruction is completed in one year, compared with 80 percent if reconstruction takes 10 years. Third, for disasters of similar magnitude, consumption losses are expected to be lower where the productivity of capital is higher, such as in capital-scarce developing countries. This mechanism may partly compensate for the many other factors that make poor countries and poor people more vulnerable to disasters. -
Publication
The Road to Recovery: The Role of Poverty in the Exposure, Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods in Accra
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06)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. -
Publication
Well Spent: How Governance Determines the Effectiveness of Infrastructure Investments
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)This study explores the role of governance in improving infrastructure reliability. It estimates that increasing infrastructure spending and improving governance in parallel is six times more effective at enhancing transport system performance than increasing spending alone. It also estimates that under current fiscal budgeting, every $1 spent on infrastructure maintenance is as effective as $1.5 of new investments in many OECD economies. Overall, the evidence in this study demonstrates that it is the quality rather than the quantity of infrastructure spending that determines the quality of infrastructure services.