Publication: Assessing Socioeconomic Resilience to Floods in 90 Countries
Date
2016-05
ISSN
Published
2016-05
Author(s)
Abstract
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.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Hallegatte, Stephane; Bangalore, Mook; Vogt-Schilb, Adrien. 2016. Assessing Socioeconomic Resilience to Floods in 90 Countries. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7663. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24503 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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