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Abstract
Building resilience against shocks has become a pillar of sustainability. By understanding how the different components of an economy interact in times of crisis, we can design resilience strategies that go beyond building walls or dams. We formulate an original agent-based model to explore a crucial pathway through which a disaster affects the economy: the transport–supply chain nexus. The model simulates the behaviour of firms facing transport and supply disruptions and estimates the resulting indirect losses. As an illustration, the model is used to assess the criticality of Tanzanian roads, which are vulnerable to floods. We report three main results. First, the model generates maps that identify the transport infrastructure assets that are most critical for specific supply chains: roads that are most important for food security are different from those supporting international trade, for instance. Second, economic losses from transport disruptions increase non-linearly with the duration of disruptions, highlighting the benefit from fast repairs. Third, by combining economic and transport modelling, we can consider a broader spectrum of interventions. Beyond strengthening the transport system, it is also possible to make supply chains more resilient to disruption with, for instance, sourcing decisions or inventory management. Assessing the performance of an economy in times of crisis is a difficult task. This study presents an agent-based model capturing the behaviour of firms facing transport and supply disruptions due to natural disasters, and shows possible paths to reinforce infrastructure and supply chain resilience.
Highlights
Building resilience against shocks has become a pillar of sustainability
Because transportation infrastructure assets are by nature localized, they are affected very heterogeneously by natural disasters and, in turn, affect the rest of the economy very heterogeneously
When all supply chains are considered, these criticality maps show the criticality of transport infrastructure for the overall economy, including the producers and consumers located in different regions
Summary
Building resilience against shocks has become a pillar of sustainability. By understanding how the different components of an economy interact in times of crisis, we can design resilience strategies that go beyond building walls or dams. Disasters are still often estimated by summing up reconstruction costs[1,2] without considering the broader implications for the functioning of the economic system This approach gives little insight into the real economic role of specific assets and the complex propagation of the shock through supply chains. Our model allows us to track how the disruption of transport nodes or links perturbs the flows of goods in supply chains and how these perturbations affect households, firms and trade. This model is a new tool for evaluating the implications of transport disruptions, identifying bottlenecks and planning for resilience. Such indicators can inform infrastructure planning[11]
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