Economics of Natural Disasters – Bridging Disaster Risk
Reduction and Climate Adaptation Efforts and Strategies
The event is organised by the International Center for Climate Governance, the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Background :: Agenda :: Location :: Secretariat :: Papers and Presentations
Background
Over the past decades, the world witnessed a striking increase in the economic losses caused by natural
disasters. While in principle natural hazards cannot be prevented, their impacts can be moderated if not
avoided.
It is well established that rising population and economic growth are the major drivers in the trend of the
observed losses. In the coming decades, anthropogenic climate change will very likely lead to more
frequent and intense meteorological and climate extreme events (Parry et al., 2007) and thus further
amplify the disaster losses, if no preventive actions are taken.
Disaster risk management addresses several global changes at the same time: First, it reduces the harm
caused by natural disasters, and increase the ability of societies to respond, recover and develop.
Second, it is vital for designing preventive measures to adapt to a changing climate.
However, an effective risk management necessitates accurate knowledge including key uncertainties of
what is at stake. The knowledge about impacts of past disasters as well as current and future disaster risk
is all but incomplete. At best, only direct losses are known and this only for some of the key sectors. Little
attention is paid to indirect (knock-on) and intangible effects, albeit these together may exceed the
direct losses.
As a consequence, actual and potential losses are underestimated and policy responses which are
based on such data are insufficient or inadequate to mitigate the future disaster risks. Often, poor
assessments of inflicted or potential losses favours primarily structural policy responses which, in the long
run, may increase the sensitivity to disasters and further exacerbate the problem.
The workshop will bring together social scientists from two so-far disconnected domains: i) analytical and
probabilistic risk assessment of today's natural hazards, and ii) adaptation to future climate extremes
and disasters. During the workshop, the state-of-the-art knowledge and practice in assessment of
economic costs imposed by natural hazard disasters will be critically reviewed and outstanding
challenges and research needs will be identified.
The workshop is meant to establish of a network of social scientists working on welfare effects of natural
disasters, in current and future climate(s). As a follow-up activity, FEEM will develop a network platform
enabling all members to exchange information about ongoing research and research outcomes, events
and exchange of academic staff. The platform will be linked to the UNISDR preventionweb.int portal.
The aforementioned network will be instrumental for facilitating the collaboration between the
institutions the network members belong to. As a first step, a proposal to established a new EUROCORES
research programme dealing with the Welfare effects of Natural Disasters will be discussed during the
workshop. This proposal will include topics identified during the workshop as having highest priority for the
sound risk assessment and evaluation of disaster risk reduction strategies/policies.
