Narrow Results

This study examines the impact of natural disasters on stock market returns and on industries that are likely to be affected by such disasters. We find that different natural disasters have different effects on stock markets and industries. Our evidence suggests that while earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes could negatively affect market returns several weeks after the events, other disasters such as floods, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions have limited impact on stock markets. We also find that construction and materials industry is generally positively affected by natural disasters but non-life and travel industries are likely to suffer negative effects.

This paper investigates the impact of the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake on plant input, output, total factor productivity (TFP) and exit using Japanese plant-level manufacturing data. We employ the difference-in-differences (DID) estimation method to identify the effects of the quake and find that the quake had an impact on manufacturing. The results suggest that production was influenced by the quake, particularly in the first year after the quake. Furthermore, the quake did not influence manufacturing industries uniformly. The effects are different based on specifications, variables, and industries. However, the quake had little impact on the exit of plants.

To investigate the impact of natural disasters on energy poverty, this study employs a panel dataset of 113 countries covering the period 2000–2014. We also conduct an asymmetric analysis on the natural disaster–energy poverty nexus. In addition, we analyze the impact mechanism between natural disasters and energy poverty. The main findings indicate that natural disasters deteriorate the energy poverty status, and this impact is asymmetric. Furthermore, technological innovation can reduce the positive impact of natural disasters on energy poverty. Also, renewable energy infrastructure is an important pathway through which natural disasters affect energy poverty.

We study damage propagation in networks, with an emphasis on production-chain models. The models are formulated as systems of Boolean delay equations. This formalism helps take into account the complexity of the interactions between firms; it turns out to be well adapted to investigating propagation of an initial damage due to a climatic or other natural disaster.

We consider in detail the effects of distinct delays and forcing, which represent external intervention to prevent economic collapse. We also account for the possible presence of randomness in the links and the delays. The paper concentrates on two different network structures, periodic and random, respectively; their study allows one to understand the effects of multiple, concurrent production paths, and the role played by the network topology in damage propagation. Applications to the recent network modeling of climate variability are discussed.

Nowadays, with the rapid expansion of social media as a means of quick communication, real-time disaster information is widely disseminated through these platforms. Determining which real-time and multi-modal disaster information can effectively support humanitarian aid has become a major challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end model, named GCN-based Multi-modal Domain Adaptation (GMDA), which consists of three essential modules: the GCN-based feature extraction module, the attention-based fusion module and the MMD domain adaptation module. The GCN-based feature extraction module integrates text and image representations through GCNs, while the attention-based fusion module then merges these multi-modal representations using an attention mechanism. Finally, the MMD domain adaptation module is utilized to alleviate the dependence of GMDA on source domain events by computing the maximum mean discrepancy across domains. Our proposed model has been extensively evaluated and has shown superior performance compared to state-of-the-art multi-modal domain adaptation models in terms of F1 score and variance stability.

Different types of social infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, are essential and necessary for supporting our daily lives and economic operations. Because 39% of Japan’s road bridges and 27% of its tunnels will have been in use for 50 years or more by 2023, maintaining them has become a significant national concern (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, White Paper on Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in Japan (2017), p. 114). Because of the declining birthrate, the deteriorating labor force, and the weakening local economy, the Japanese government must maintain these social infrastructures while facing severe budgetary challenges. And efficient and economical maintenance strategies and plans are required. This paper proposes optimal maintenance policies which consider the unique circumstances of social infrastructure and minimize maintenance costs. By applying these policies to wave-dissipating blocks in Japan, the effectiveness of them is confirmed.

Understanding the feasibility and cost of adaptation is essential to management of the global climate. Unfortunately, we lack general estimates of adaptive responses to almost all climatological processes. To address this for one phenomenon, we estimate the extent of adaptation to tropical cyclones (TCs) using the global cross-section of countries. We reconstruct every TC observed during 1950–2008 to parameterize countries' TC climate and year-to-year TC exposure. We then look for evidence of adaptation by comparing deaths and damages from physically similar TC events across countries with different TC climatologies. We find that countries with more intense TC climates suffer lower marginal losses from an actual TC event, indicating that adaptation to this climatological risk occurs but that it is costly. Overall, there is strong evidence that it is both feasible and cost-effective for countries with intense TC climatologies to invest heavily in adaptation. However, marginal changes from countries' current TC climates generate persistent losses, of which only ~3% is "adapted away" in the long run.

Using a comprehensive dataset of 272 large-scale natural disasters in 83 countries from 1986 to 2018, we find that disasters increase government debt financing costs (T-bill rates and 10-year government bond yields) but only in the middle- and low-income countries. This distinct response relative to high-income countries is due to lower levels of credit market depth, of private insurance penetration, and of central bank independence. The results for all natural disasters are driven by biological (epidemic) and climatological disasters — two types of hazards, the frequency and severity of which have been rising.

Mediterranean hurricanes, or “medicanes”, are powerful cyclonic disturbances that cause wind, flooding, and surge damages around the Mediterranean region. Recent advancements in the natural sciences have improved historical understanding of medicane characteristics. Yet a systematic analysis of the economic impacts of medicanes has not been carried out. In this paper, we analyze 62 years of newly re-analyzed historical medicane tracks to characterize landfalls across space and time. We match historical landfalls with local socioeconomic characteristics. Using a cyclone damages function, we estimate historical medicane losses. We find that Italy suffers the highest expected damages from medicanes at $33 million dollars annually. Scaling by location size, Mediterranean islands are most at risk. We also present findings on landfall characteristics and calculate the return rate for storm damages. These findings are important for policy, especially with regard to the costs and benefits of long run adaptation.

This paper is devoted to some important welfare economic issues related to natural disasters, in particular those connected with floods and storms. Our analysis of the social cost of a natural disaster is different from (most) existing analyses, in that we focus sharply on the welfare effects of a disaster. We derive a simple dynamic general equilibrium cost–benefit rule, which captures loss in production of private and public goods, as well as the value of (statistical) lives lost; it also clarifies the role played by changes in stocks and flows, respectively. Standard analysis of losses typically only includes damages to market-priced stocks and flows, thus our model paints a different picture of social cost. This difference is particularly striking for disaster that results in many deaths, but has relatively low (reported) costs. We take our model to the data by using EM-DAT, one of the several prominent databases in this literature, focusing on water-related disasters in the US.

We study the statistics of human deaths from wars and similar man-made conflicts as well as natural disasters. The probability distribution of number of people killed in natural disasters as well as man-made situations show power law decay for the largest sizes, with similar exponent values. Comparisons with natural disasters, when event sizes are measured in terms of physical quantities (e.g., energy released in earthquake, volume of rainfall, land area affected in forest fires, etc.) also show striking resemblances. The universal patterns in their statistics suggest that some subtle similarities in their mechanisms and dynamics might be responsible.

Climate change is a pervasive global challenge with far-reaching implications for both the environment and human society. A thorough comprehension of these repercussions is essential in crafting effective strategies to mitigate their effects. Climate change, a major threat to sustainable development, impacts the environment, economy, natural resources, food security, human health, and physical infrastructure globally. Bangladesh stands out among affected nations due to geographical and socio-economic vulnerabilities. Despite its vulnerability, Bangladesh has successfully mitigated the impact of extreme events over the years. This study focuses on examining climate change, its outcomes, and mitigation initiatives in Bangladesh. It endeavors to offer a comprehensive analysis of the current climate scenario in Bangladesh, delving into pivotal trends, impacts, adaptation strategies, and evaluating the effectiveness of national policies, legal frameworks, involvement of local governments, non-governmental organizations, and international collaborative efforts in developing an efficient disaster risk reduction and anticipatory action system. Despite achievements, safeguarding the livelihoods and properties of vulnerable communities from disaster-induced loss and damage remains a challenge. Additionally, addressing past adaptation failures is crucial. The paper highlights the necessity to enhance disaster risk reduction, green economy, promote economic development, implement government policies, and bolster anticipatory action systems, emphasizing the pivotal role of establishing a locally led climate-resilient system in addressing these challenges.

Climate change could significantly reduce the quality of life for poor people in Asia. Extreme heat and drought, and the increased incidence of natural disasters will pose new challenges for the urban poor and rural farmers. If farming profits decline, urbanization rates will accelerate and the social costs of rapid urbanization could increase due to rising infectious disease rates, pollution, and congestion. This paper studies strategies for reducing the increased social costs imposed on cities by climate change.

This paper uses multivariate dynamic panel analysis to examine the response of international financial flows to natural disasters. The models estimated for a large sample of developing countries point to differentiated responses of specific types of financial flows. The results show that remittance inflows increase significantly in response to shocks to both climatic and geological disasters, thus confirming their compensatory nature. The models suggest a nuanced role for foreign aid. While the responses of aid flows to natural disaster shocks in general tend not to be statistically significant, international assistance to low income countries increases following geological disaster shocks. Furthermore, the results show that typically, other private capital flows (bank lending and equity) do not attenuate the effects of disasters and in some specifications, even amplify the negative economic effects of these events.

Disaster prevention and mitigation in rural areas plays an important role in agricultural development and rural revitalization. Most of the existing studies have studied the effect of disaster prevention and mitigation in rural areas, but there is a lack of comprehensive analysis of the benefits it can produce. This paper adopts the empirical analysis method to analyze the impact of rural disaster prevention and mitigation on the comprehensive income of villagers and studies the mediating role of villagers’ awareness of disaster prevention in this mechanism. Through the survey data of a village in Hubei Province, China, it is concluded that the rural disaster prevention and mitigation work has a significant positive correlation with the comprehensive income of the villagers, and the villagers’ awareness of disaster prevention has a partial mediating effect.

We document a link between religiosity and natural disasters — earthquakes in particular. Using modern data from surveys, we first show that religiosity has increased in the aftermath of disasters such as earthquakes. As emotional effects can be analytically disentangled from those of physical destruction, we suggest that religious coping is the most potent link; people use their religion for comfort and explanation to match the other-worldly aspect of seismic destruction. Second, we show that the major religions of the modern world emerged in a remarkably tight band along seismically active plate-tectonic boundaries, suggesting the persistence of this link. Third, we show that the majority of known immediate cultural responses to historic earthquakes have been religious rather than secular. We conclude that religion tends to emerge as a response to the unanswerable questions posed by earthquakes, and other natural disasters, and as a provider of comfort to survivors. Earthquakes may thus have played a pivotal role for millennia in the emergence and persistence of religion.

This chapter discusses the challenges arising for emergency logistics as a result of natural disasters as well as the empirical and quantitative approaches to a successful management of supply chain (SC) disruptions. In the first part, examples of recent natural catastrophes, their impact, and recovery measures are analyzed. In the second part, existing literature and examples of recent disasters are reviewed regarding the qualitative frameworks for SC disruption management and quantitative approaches to mitigate disruptions, and allow for recovery. The third part of this chapter is devoted to the critical analysis of the existing practices and methods, and elaborates on the improvement recommendations. In the fourth part, existing quantitative methods for disaster logistics are analysed. The fifth section is devoted to the best practice analysis in SC disruption management. The chapter is concluded by a summary and an outlook.

Extreme natural hazards, particularly the hydro-meteorological disasters, are emerging as a cause of major concern in the coastal regions of India and a few other developing countries. These have become more frequent in the recent past, and are taking a heavy toll of life and livelihoods. Low level of technology development in the rural areas together with social, economic and gender inequities enhance the vulnerability of the largely illiterate, unskilled, and resource-poor fishing, farming and landless labour communities. Their resilience to bounce back to pre-disaster level of normality is highly limited. For the planet Earth at crossroads, the imminent threat, however, is from a vicious spiral among environmental degradation, poverty and climate change-related natural disasters interacting in a mutually reinforcing manner. These, in turn, retard sustainable development, and also wipe out any small gains made thereof. To counter this unacceptable trend, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation has developed a biovillage paradigm and rural knowledge centres for ecotechnological and knowledge empowerment of the coastal communities at risk. Frontier science and technologies blended with traditional knowledge and ecological prudence result in ecotechnologies with pro-nature, pro-poor and pro-women orientation. The rural communities are given training and helped to develop capacity to adopt ecotechnologies for market-driven eco-enterprises. The modern information and communication-based rural knowledge centres largely operated by trained semi-literate young women provide time- and locale-specific information on weather, crop and animal husbandry, market trends and prices for local communities, healthcare, transport, education, etc. to the local communities. The ecotechnologies and time- and locale-specific information content development are need-based and chosen in a ‘bottom-up’ manner. The use of recombinant DNA technology for genetic shielding of agricultural crops for coastal regions against abiotic stress (induced by the water- and weather-related natural disasters), strengthens the foundations of sustainable agriculture undertaken by the resource-poor small farm families.