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 - 10 of 16
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Publication
A Cost Effective Solution to Reduce Disaster Losses in Developing Countries : Hydro-Meteorological Services, Early Warning, and Evacuation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-05)In Europe, it can be estimated that hydro-meteorological information and early warning systems save several hundreds of lives per year, avoid between 460 million and 2.7 billion Euros of disaster asset losses per year, and produce between 3.4 and 34 billion of additional benefits per year through the optimization of economic production in weather-sensitive sectors (agriculture, energy, etc.). The potential for similar benefits in the developing world is not only proportional to population, but also to increased hazard risk due to climate and geography, as well as increased exposure to weather due to the state of infrastructure. This analysis estimates that the potential benefits from upgrading to developed-country standards the hydro-meteorological information production and early warning capacity in all developing countries include: (i) between 300 million and 2 billion USD per year of avoided asset losses due to natural disasters; (ii) an average of 23,000 saved lives per year, which is valued between 700 million and 3.5 billion USD per year using the Copenhagen Consensus guidelines; and (iii) between 3 and 30 billion USD per year of additional economic benefits. The total benefits would reach between 4 and 36 billion USD per year. Because some of the most expensive components of early warning systems have already been built (e.g., earth observation satellites, global weather forecasts), these investments are relatively modest, estimated here around 1 billion US per year, reaching benefit-cost ratios between 4 and 36. -
Publication
Carbon Price Efficiency : Lock-in and Path Dependence in Urban Forms and Transport Infrastructure
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)This paper investigates the effect of carbon or gasoline taxes on commuting-related CO2 emissions in an urban context. To assess the impact of public transport on the efficiency of the tax, the paper investigates two exogenous scenarios using a dynamic urban model (NEDUM-2D) calibrated for the urban area of Paris: (i) a scenario with the current dense public transport infrastructure, and (ii) a scenario without. It is shown that the price elasticity of CO2 emissions is twice as high in the short run if public transport options exist. Reducing commuting-related emissions thus requires lower (and more acceptable) tax levels in the presence of dense public transportation. If the goal of a carbon or gasoline tax is to change behaviors and reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions (not to raise revenues), then there is an incentive to increase the price elasticity through complementary policies such as public transport development. The emission elasticity also depends on the baseline scenario and is larger when population growth and income growth are high. In the longer run, elasticities are higher and similar in the scenarios with and without public transport, because of larger urban reconfiguration in the latter scenario. These results are policy relevant, especially for fast-growing cities in developing countries. Even for cities where emission reductions are not a priority today, there is an option value attached to a dense public transport network, since it makes it possible to reduce emissions at a lower cost in the future. -
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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
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. -
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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
Floods and Their Impacts on Firms: Evidence from Tanzania
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09)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. -
Publication
Transport Policies for Climate Change: The Transformative Role Transport Can Play in Mitigation and Adaptation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05)The choices developing countries make today in building and expanding transport networks will irreversibly shape development for the next century. That is why urgent steps are needed to ensure that transport development avoids locking in carbon intensive or high-risk patterns. While investments in urban planning and public transportation pay off over the long term, they also entail high up-front costs, making it essential to scale up support from the World Bank Group and other international institutions. The commitment to achieving zero net emissions by 2100 made at the Paris climate negotiations cannot be achieved without radical changes in how cities grow, and transport planning must be part of green growth strategies. Furthermore, climate-related issues such as food security, extreme weather events, and the health impacts of urban pollution have ties to the quality, affordability, and availability of affordable transport in both rural and urban areas. With many cities in developing countries only now planning transport infrastructure, this is the ideal time to ensure that transport planning incorporates climate-smart and low-carbon priorities.