Abstract
Quantified flood risk assessments focus on asset losses, neglecting longer-term impacts to household welfare via income and consumption losses. The extent of welfare losses depends upon resilience – the ability to anticipate, resist, cope, recover and learn from a shock. Here, we use a novel welfare loss modelling framework and perform a high-resolution spatial analysis in coastal Bangladesh to quantify welfare losses from a tropical cyclone under present and future climatic and socio-economic conditions. We further test various adaptation options that are intended to enhance resilience. Results show that poor households experience, on average, 7% of the asset losses, but 42% of the welfare losses. Combining dike heightening, post-disaster support and stronger housing can reduce welfare losses by up to 70%, and foster sustainable development by benefitting the poor, increasing resilience and demonstrating robustness under socio-economic and climatic uncertainties. Thus, a welfare-orientated perspective helps to identify adaptation options that enhance resilience and leave no-one behind.
Highlights
Floods impose a heavy burden on society, causing billions of dollars in damages annually, with a rising trend observed over the last years (Bouwer, 2011; Hallegatte, 2012; Jongman et al, 2012)
sea-level rise (SLR) will worsen the situation in these parts, thereby mainly affecting Barisal, Jhalokati, Patuakhali and Pirojpur
We further estimate that the asset losses directly affect the welfare of 57,600 households and potentially up to 84,150 in 2050 due to SLR alone, which, given an average 4.5 person per house holds, equals ~260,000 and ~380,000 people, respectively
Summary
Floods impose a heavy burden on society, causing billions of dollars in damages annually, with a rising trend observed over the last years (Bouwer, 2011; Hallegatte, 2012; Jongman et al, 2012). There is an urgent need to develop robust disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies to reduce climate-related risks and build more resilient communities. The UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (UNISDR, 2015) calls for increasing attention to the disproportional impacts of floods, the need to consider non-structural solutions to ensure effective recovery and rehabilitation, and the intersection of DRR with sustainable development policies. It is a challenge to quantify the benefits of non-structural measures, like insurance and post-disasters support, in conventional risk assessments, as they do not directly reduce asset losses. Using asset losses as a proxy for disaster risk may obscure the distribu tional impacts of disasters and fails to capture the wider welfare losses from natural disasters
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