Person:
Hallegatte, Stéphane

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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).
Citations 1895 Scopus

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Measuring Natural Risks in the Philippines: Socioeconomic Resilience and Wellbeing Losses
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01) Walsh, Brian ; Hallegatte, Stephane
    Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. This paper proposes an expanded risk assessment based on a framework that adds socioeconomic resilience and uses wellbeing losses as its main measure of disaster severity. Using a new, agent-based model that represents explicitly the recovery and reconstruction process at the household level, this risk assessment provides new insights into disaster risks in the Philippines. First, there is a close link between natural disasters and poverty. On average, the estimates suggest that almost half a million Filipinos per year face transient consumption poverty due to natural disasters. Nationally, the bottom income quintile suffers only 9 percent of the total asset losses, but 31 percent of the total wellbeing losses. The average annual wellbeing losses due to disasters in the Philippines is estimated at US$3.9 billion per year, more than double the asset losses of US$1.4 billion. Second, the regions identified as priorities for risk-management interventions differ depending on which risk metric is used. Cost-benefit analyses based on asset losses direct risk reduction investments toward the richest regions and areas. A focus on poverty or wellbeing rebalances the analysis and generates a different set of regional priorities. Finally, measuring disaster impacts through poverty and wellbeing impacts allows the quantification of the benefits from interventions like rapid post-disaster support and adaptive social protection. Although these measures do not reduce asset losses, they efficiently reduce their consequences for wellbeing by making the population more resilient.
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    Infrastructure Disruptions: How Instability Breeds Household Vulnerability
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Obolensky, Marguerite ; Erman, Alvina ; Rozenberg, Julie ; Rentschler, Jun ; Avner, Paolo ; Hallegatte, Stephane
    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.
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    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) 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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    Revised Estimates of the Impact of Climate Change on Extreme Poverty by 2030
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09) Jafino, Bramka Arga ; Walsh, Brian ; Rozenberg, Julie ; Hallegatte, Stephane
    Thousands of scenarios are used to provide updated estimates for the impacts of climate change on extreme poverty in 2030. The range of the number of people falling into poverty due to climate change is between 32 million and 132 million in most scenarios. These results are commensurate with available estimates for the global poverty increase due to COVID-19. Socioeconomic drivers play a major role: optimistic baseline scenarios (rapid and inclusive growth with universal access to basic services in 2030) halve poverty impacts compared with the pessimistic baselines. Health impacts (malaria, diarrhea, and stunting) and the effect of food prices are responsible for most of the impact. The effect of food prices is the most important factor in Sub-Saharan Africa, while health effects, natural disasters, and food prices are all important in South Asia. These results suggest that accelerated action to boost resilience is urgent, and the COVID-19 recovery packages offer opportunities to do so.