Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters

By StÃ©phane Hallegatte, A. Vogt-Schilb, M. Bangalore, Julie Rozenberg. 2016

485 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Economic losses from natural disasters totaled 92 billion dollars 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 dollars 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 todisaster 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.

Subfields: Soil Science

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Citations in the corpus

Exposure to Floods, Climate Change, and Poverty in Vietnam (2016, background): “As these income sources are often unaffected by a local flood event, income losses for non-poor people may be less pronounced (Hallegatte et al. 2017).”
Extreme Weather and Climate Change: Population Health and Health System Implications (2021, background): “Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have suffered smaller total economic losses, but the losses are often a larger proportion of their nations’ economies and arguably have greater consequences for well-being (67).”
Disaster risk, climate change, and poverty: assessing the global exposure of poor people to floods and droughts (2015, background): “A recent report (Hallegatte et al., 2017) assessing the well-being impacts from natural disasters suggests that when including all these dimensions – exposure, vulnerability, and the ability-to-adapt – the impact of extreme weather on poverty is more devastating than previously understood, responsib”
Human impact parameterizations in global hydrological models improve estimates of monthly discharges and hydrological extremes: a multi-model validation study (2018, background): “…a multitude of high-level policy documents, such as the UN World Water Development Reports (e.g. Alcamo and Gallopin 2009), Global Environmental Outlooks (UNEP 2007), the World Bank series on climate change and development (Hallegatte et al 2016, 2017 and IPCC assessment reports (IPCC 2007, 2013).”
Socio-Economic Impacts of COVID-19 on Household Consumption and Poverty (2020, methodology): “To understand the impacts of the loss of revenue on the lower income level populations, a household well-being formulation is adopted following the work of (Hallegatte et al. 2016).”
Flood exposure and poverty in 188 countries (2021, background): “While the flood hazard map offers inundation depths along a continuous scale, we aggregate the values into five risk categories, defined in line with an approximation of the risk to the lives and livelihoods of affected people: (1) “No risk”: areas that are estimated to remain unaffected during 100-”
Poverty and climate change: introduction (2018, background): “A recent report (Hallegatte et al., 2017) reviews dozens of case studies showing that poverty increases after natural disasters, and estimates that, on average, 26million people are falling into poverty every year due to natural disasters, especially relatively frequent floods and drought.”
Gender Dimensions of Disaster Risk and Resilience (2021, methodology): “It combines two existing World Bank frameworks, for: » Analyzing gender (World Bank 2012) » Assessing socioeconomic resilience to natural hazards (Hallegatte et al. 2017).”
From Poverty to Disaster and Back: a Review of the Literature (2020, background): “In rural areas, more abundant land (and possibly the benefits of floods for agricultural production) may explain why poor people are not systematically overexposed (Hallegatte et al. 2016c, b, c).”
Report of the high-level commission on carbon prices (2017, background): “They can also wipe out poor people’s decades of savings in an instant, and often force people to cope by reducing their food intake or health care expenditures, or by taking children out of school (Hallegatte et al. 2017).”
The Impacts of Climate Change on the Poor in Disadvantaged Regions (2018, background): “…poor in coastal areas are especially vulnerable to natural disaster shocks, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, and other extreme coastal events (Badola and Hussein 2005; McSweeney 2005; Carter et al. 2007; Barbier 2008, 2015; Das and Vincent 2009; Laso Bayas et al. 2011; Hallegatte et al. 2017).”
Revised Estimates of the Impact of Climate Change on Extreme Poverty by 2030 (2020, background): “It is important to remember that the impact of natural disasters in this study is only the incremental change due to man-made climate change and needs to be added to the effect of today’s natural disasters on poverty, which is already very significant (Hallegatte et al. 2017).”