Person:
Hallegatte, Stéphane
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Green growth,
Climate change,
Urban development
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Last updated
September 13, 2023
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).
Publication Search Results
1 - 9 of 9
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Publication
Infrastructure Disruptions: How Instability Breeds Household Vulnerability
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)This review examines the literature on the welfare impacts of infrastructure disruptions. There is widespread evidence that households suffer from the consequences of a lack of infrastructure reliability, and that being connected to the grid is not sufficient to close the infrastructure gap. Disruptions and irregular service have adverse effects on household welfare, due to missed work and education opportunities, and negative impact on health. Calibrating costs of unreliable infrastructure on existing willingness to pay assessments, we estimate the welfare losses associated with blackouts and water outages. Overall, between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of GDP would be lost each year because of unreliable infrastructure -- electricity, water and transport. -
Publication
Strengthening New Infrastructure Assets: A Cost-Benefit Analysis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)This paper explores the benefits and the costs of strengthening infrastructure assets to make them more resilient, reducing the repair costs and infrastructure disruptions caused by natural hazards. Strengthening infrastructure assets in low- and middle-income countries would increase investment needs in power, transport, and water and sanitation by between $11 billion and $65 billion a year, i.e. 3 percent of baseline infrastructure investment needs. The uncertainty pertaining to the costs and benefits of infrastructure resilience makes it difficult to provide a single estimate for the benefit-cost ratio of strengthening exposed infrastructure assets. To manage this uncertainty, this paper explores the benefit-cost ratio in 3,000 scenarios, combining uncertainties in all parameters of the analysis. The benefit-cost ratio is higher than 1 in 96 percent of the scenarios, larger than 2 in 77 percent of them, and higher than 4 in half of them. The net present value of these investments over the lifetime of new infrastructure assets -- or, equivalently, the cost of inaction -- exceeds $2 trillion in 75 percent of the scenarios and $4.2 trillion in half of them. Moreover, climate change makes the strengthening of infrastructure assets even more important, doubling the median benefit-cost ratio. -
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
Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-06-19)From serving our most basic needs to enabling our most ambitious ventures in trade and technology, infrastructure services are essential for raising and maintaining people’s quality of life. Yet millions of people, especially in low- and middle-income countries, are facing the consequences of unreliable electricity grids, inadequate water and sanitation systems, and overstrained transport networks. Natural hazards magnify the challenges faced by these fragile systems. Building on a wide range of case studies, global empirical analyses, and modeling exercises, Lifelines lays out a framework for understanding infrastructure resilience—the ability of infrastructure systems to function and meet users’ needs during and after a natural shock—and it makes an economic case for building more resilient infrastructure. Lifelines concludes by identifying five obstacles to resilient infrastructure and offering concrete recommendations and specific actions that can be taken by governments, stakeholders, and the international community to improve the quality and resilience of these essential services, and thereby contribute to more resilient and prosperous societies. -
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
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. -
Publication
Resilient Infrastructure for Thriving Firms: A Review of The Evidence
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)This review examines the literature on the role of infrastructure in determining the productivity and competitiveness of firms. It shows that the existing evidence base is clear in concluding that reliable and high-quality infrastructure is a crucial foundation for enabling businesses to thrive. It demonstrates that the provision of electricity, transport, water, and telecommunications systems increases firm-level productivity. It also shows that providing infrastructure per se is not enough to boost productivity, unless it offers reliable service. Disruptions and irregular service have substantial adverse effects on firms, not least due to disrupted supply chains, underutilization of production capacity, and costly adaptation measures. -
Publication
Underutilized Potential: The Business Costs of Unreliable Infrastructure in Developing Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)This study constructs a microdata set of about 143,000 firms to estimate the monetary costs of infrastructure disruptions in 137 low- and middle-income countries, representing 78 percent of the world population and 80 percent of the GDP of low- and -middle-income countries. Specifically, this study assesses the impact of transport, electricity, and water disruptions on the capacity utilization rates of firms. The estimates suggest that utilization losses amount to $151 billion a year -- of which $107 billion are due to transport disruptions, $38 billion due to blackouts, and $6 billion due to dryouts. Moreover, this study shows that electricity outages are causing sales losses equivalent to $82 billion a year. Firms are also incurring the costs of self-generated electricity, estimated to amount to $64 billion a year (including annualized capital expenditure). At almost $300 billion a year, these figures highlight the substantial drag that unreliable infrastructure imposes on firms in developing countries. Yet, these figures are likely to be under-estimates as neither all countries nor all types of impacts are covered.