Person: Hallegatte, Stéphane
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Green growth, Climate change, Urban development
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Last updated: January 22, 2025
Biography
Stéphane Hallegatte is Chief Climate Economist 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 resilient low-emission development, the monitoring and measurement of climate policies on jobs, incomes, poverty, and quality of life; the inclusion of climate change and natural disasters in macroeconomic models and poverty assessments; and exploring the political economy of policies and their robustness to uncertainty.
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).
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Publication Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016) Bangalore, Mook; Hallegatte, Stephane; Bonzanigo, Laura; Kane, Tamaro; Fay, Marianne; Narloch, Ulf; Treguer, David; Rozenberg, Julie; Vogt-Schilb, AdrienEnding poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win” situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.Publication Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-06-19) Hallegatte, Stephane; Rentschler, Jun; Rozenberg, JulieFrom 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 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, StephaneThousands 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 Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017) Bangalore, Mook; Hallegatte, Stephane; Vogt-Schilb, Adrien; Rozenberg, Julie“Economic losses from natural disasters totaled $92 billion in 2015.” Such statements, all too commonplace, assess the severity of disasters by no other measure than the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production. But $1 in losses does not mean the same thing to a rich person that it does to a poor person; the gravity of a $92 billion loss depends on who experiences it. By focusing on aggregate losses—the traditional approach to disaster risk—we restrict our consideration to how disasters affect those wealthy enough to have assets to lose in the first place, and largely ignore the plight of poor people. This report moves beyond asset and production losses and shifts its attention to how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. Disasters are far greater threats to well-being than traditional estimates suggest. This approach provides a more nuanced view of natural disasters than usual reporting, and a perspective that takes fuller account of poor people’s vulnerabilities. Poor people suffer only a fraction of economic losses caused by disasters, but they bear the brunt of their consequences. Understanding the disproportionate vulnerability of poor people also makes the case for setting new intervention priorities to lessen the impact of natural disasters on the world’s poor, such as expanding financial inclusion, disaster risk and health insurance, social protection and adaptive safety nets, contingent finance and reserve funds, and universal access to early warning systems. Efforts to reduce disaster risk and poverty go hand in hand. Because disasters impoverish so many, disaster risk management is inseparable from poverty reduction policy, and vice versa. As climate change magnifies natural hazards, and because protection infrastructure alone cannot eliminate risk, a more resilient population has never been more critical to breaking the cycle of disaster-induced poverty.Publication Adaptation Principles: A Guide for Designing Strategies for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-17) Hallegatte, Stephane; Rentschler, Jun; Rozenberg, JulieEffective 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.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) Colon, Celian; Hallegatte, Stephane; Rozenberg, JulieThe 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 Strengthening New Infrastructure Assets: A Cost-Benefit Analysis(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Nicolas, Claire; Hallegatte, Stephane; Fox, Charles; Rozenberg, Julie; Rentschler, JunThis 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 Climate Change and Poverty : An Analytical Framework(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-11) Bangalore, Mook; Hallegatte, Stephane; Bonzanigo, Laura; Fay, Marianne; Narloch, Ulf; Rozenberg, Julie; Vogt-Schilb, AdrienClimate change and climate policies will affect poverty reduction efforts through direct and immediate impacts on the poor and by affecting factors that condition poverty reduction, such as economic growth. This paper explores this relation between climate change and policies and poverty outcomes by examining three questions: the (static) impact on poor people's livelihood and well-being; the impact on the risk for non-poor individuals to fall into poverty; and the impact on the ability of poor people to escape poverty. The paper proposes four channels that determine household consumption and through which households may escape or fall into poverty (prices, assets, productivity, and opportunities). It then discusses whether and how these channels are affected by climate change and climate policies, focusing on the exposure, vulnerability, and ability to adapt of the poor (and those vulnerable to poverty). It reviews the existing literature and offers three major conclusions. First, climate change is likely to represent a major obstacle to a sustained eradication of poverty. Second, climate policies are compatible with poverty reduction provided that (i) poverty concerns are carefully taken into account in their design and (ii) they are accompanied by the appropriate set of social policies. Third, climate change does not modify how poverty policies should be designed, but it creates greater needs and more urgency. The scale issue is explained by the fact that climate will cause more frequent and more severe shocks; the urgency, by the need to exploit the window of opportunity given to us before climate impacts are likely to substantially increase.Publication Decarbonizing Development: Three Steps to a Zero-Carbon Future(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015-06) Fay, Marianne; Hallegatte, Stephane; Vogt-Schilb, Adrien; Rozenberg, Julie; Narloch, Ulf; Kerr, TomThe science is unequivocal: stabilizing climate change implies bringing net carbon emissions to zero. And this must be done by 2100 if we are to keep climate change anywhere near the 2 C. degree warming that world leaders have set as the maximum acceptable limit. Decarbonizing Development looks at what it would take to decarbonize the world economy by 2100 in a way that is compatible with countries’ broader development goals. It argues that the following are needed: Act early with an eye on the end-goal; Go beyond prices with a policy package that triggers changes in investment patterns, technologies and behaviors; Mind the political economy and smooth the transition for those who stand to be most affected.Publication From A Rocky Road to Smooth Sailing: Building Transport Resilience to Natural Disasters(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Espinet Alegre, Xavier; Rozenberg, Julie; Avner, Paolo; Fox, Charles; Koks, Elco; Hallegatte, Stephane; Tariverdi, Mersedeh; Rentschler, Jun; Avner, PaoloReliable 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.