Person:
Hallegatte, Stéphane
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Green growth,
Climate change,
Urban development
Degrees
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Externally Hosted Work
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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
Integrating Climate Change and Natural Disasters in the Economic Analysis of Projects: A Disaster and Climate Risk Stress Test Methodology
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)To maximize development gains, World Bank projects must consider climate change and disaster risks in their design and appraisal. Buildings could be exposed to heat waves, roads might be vulnerable to floods, and agricultural practices may be subject to drought and pests. Although projects can be simultaneously vulnerable to several such risks, in most cases, it is possible to design and implement projects that are resilient to future climate change and natural risks. Doing so, however, requires these risks to be considered at each step of the project cycle. To select the best projects and ensure they deliver as expected, it is important to ensure that all project appraisal and assessment processes including economic analyses properly consider all risks. This guidance note proposes a simple methodology for doing this by adding a stress test for climate change and natural disasters to the economic analysis of a project. -
Publication
Macroeconomic Consequences of Natural Disasters: A Modeling Proposal and Application to Floods and Earthquakes in Turkey
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-22)Turkey is vulnerable to natural disasters that can generate substantial damages to public and private sector infrastructure capital. Earthquakes and floods are the most frequent hazards today, and flood risks are expected to increase with climate change. To ensure stability and growth and minimize the welfare impact of these disasters, these shocks need to be managed and accounted for in macro-fiscal and monetary policy. To support this process, the World Bank Macrostructural Model is adapted to assess the macroeconomic effects of natural (geophysical or climate-related) disasters. The macroeconomic model is extended on several fronts: (1) a distinction is made between infrastructure and non-infrastructure capital, with complementary or substitutability between the two categories; (2) the production function is adjusted to account for short-term complementarity across capital assets; (3) the reconstruction process is modeled in a way that accounts for post-disaster constraints, with distinct processes for the reconstruction of public and private assets. The results show that destroyed infrastructure capital makes the remaining non-infrastructure capital less productive, which means that disasters reduce the total stock of capital, but also its productivity. The welfare impact of a disaster—proxied by the discounted consumption loss—is found to increase non-linearly with direct asset losses. Macroeconomic responses reduce the welfare impact of minor disasters but magnify it when direct asset losses exceed the economy’s absorption capacity. The welfare impact also depends on the pre-existing economic situation, the ability of the economy to reallocate resources toward reconstruction, and the response of the monetary policy. Appropriate macro-fiscal and monetary policies offer cost-effective opportunities to mitigate the welfare impact of major disasters. -
Publication
Rapid Urban Growth in Flood Zones: Global Evidence since 1985
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-04)As countries rapidly urbanize, settlements are expanding into hazardous flood zones. This study provides a global analysis of spatial urbanization patterns and the evolution of flood exposure between 1985 and 2015. Using high-resolution annual data, it shows that settlements across the world grew by 85 percent to over 1.28 million square kilometers. In the same period, settlements exposed to the highest flood hazard level increased by 122 percent. In many regions, risky growth is outpacing safe growth, particularly in East Asia, where high-risk settlements have expanded 60 percent faster than safe ones. Developing countries are driving the recent growth of flood exposure: 36,500 square kilometers of settlements were built in the world’s highest-risk zones since 1985–82 percent of which are in low- and middle-income countries. In comparison, recent growth in high-income countries has been relatively slow and safe. These results document a divergence in countries’ exposure to flood hazards. Rather than adapting their exposure to climatic hazards, many countries are actively increasing their exposure. -
Publication
Natural Disasters, Poverty and Inequality: New Metrics for Fairer Policies
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-10-28)Conventional risk assessments underestimate the human and macroeconomic costs of disasters, leading to inefficient risk management strategies. This happens because conventional assessments focus on asset losses, neglecting important relationships between vulnerability and development. When affected by a hazard, poor households take longer to recover from disasters and are more likely to face long-term consequences. Forced to manage trade-offs between essential consumption and reconstruction, these households are more likely to face persistent health or education costs. This chapter proposes a review of existing research into the natural disaster-poverty-inequality nexus and the various metrics that can be used to measure disaster impacts, such as recovery times, economic (income or consumption) losses, poverty incidence, inequality, and welfare or well-being losses. Each of these metrics provides a different perspective on disaster costs and suggest different spatial and sectoral priorities for action. Focusing on the concepts of well-being losses and socioeconomic resilience, this chapter shows how more comprehensive accounting of disaster impacts can better inform disaster risk management and climate change adaptation strategies and support their integration into development and poverty-reduction policies. -
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
Best Investments for an Economic Recovery from Coronavirus: An Illustration Based on the Fiji Climate Vulnerability Assessment to Pinpoint Stimulus Options
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08-25)The COVID-19 crisis is causing massive suffering across the globe. In addition to the human consequences of the disease, containment measures to slow down and control the virus have deprived people of their livelihood and put many firms in a difficult financial situation. As a result, governments are planning massive stimulus packages to accelerate recovery once the health emergency is under control. To help governments think through investments for a green recovery, we proposed a sustainability checklist to screen potential projects and policies. To test how the sustainability checklist might work for a specific country, the checklist was applied to the Fiji Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA). The objective is to demonstrate how the checklist can be used as a screening, scoring, and prioritization tool to identify projects that create synergies between short-term needs and long-term objectives. -
Publication
'Building Back Better' in Practice: A Science-Policy Framework for a Green Economic Recovery after COVID-19
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-01)As humanity’s current production and consumption patterns exceed planetary boundaries, many opinion leaders have stressed the need to adopt green economic stimulus policies in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. This paper provides an integrated framework to design an economic recovery strategy aligned with sustainability objectives through a multi-criterion, multi-stakeholder lens. The aim is to enable decisions by policy makers with the aid of transparent workflows that include expert evidence that is based on quantitative open-source modeling, and qualitative input by diverse social actors in a participatory approach. The paper employs an energy systems model and an economic input-output model to provide quantitative evidence and design a multi-criteria decision process that engages stakeholders from government, enterprises, and civil society. As a case study, the paper studies 13 green recovery measures that are relevant for Cyprus and assesses their appropriateness for criteria related to environmental sustainability, socioeconomic and job impact, and climate resilience. The results highlight trade-offs between immediate and long-run effects, between economic and environmental objectives, and between expert evidence and societal priorities. Importantly, the paper finds that a “return-to-normal” economic stimulus is not only environmentally unsustainable, but also economically inferior to most green recovery schemes. -
Publication
Revised Estimates of the Impact of Climate Change on Extreme Poverty by 2030
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09)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. -
Publication
Adaptation Principles: A Guide for Designing Strategies for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-17)Effective action on resilience and climate change adaptation can be a complex task—requiring coordinated efforts from the highest levels of government to individual households and firms. The Adaptation Principles offer a guide to effective climate change adaptation, containing hands-on guidance to the design, implementation and monitoring of national adaptation strategies. It specifies six guiding principles, which correspond to common policy domains: 1) Ensuring resilient foundations through rapid and inclusive development; 2) Facilitating the adaptation of firms and people; 3) Adapting land use and protecting critical public assets and services; 4) Increasing people’s capacity to cope with and recover from shocks; 5) Anticipating and managing macroeconomic and fiscal risks; 6) Ensuring effective implementation through prioritization and continuous monitoring. While outlining these universal Adaptation Principles, this guide shows that each country needs to tailor these actions to its specific needs and priorities. To guide this process, Adaptation Principles offers concrete and practical tools: Screening questions to identify the most urgent and effective actions, toolboxes illustrating common datasets and methodologies to support decisions, indicators to monitor and evaluate progress, and case studies on how the COVID-19 pandemic influences priorities in taking effective adaptation action.