This paper presents a model to assess the socioeconomic resilience to natural disasters of an economy, defined as its capacity to mitigate the impact of disaster-related asset losses on welfare, and a tool to help decision makers identify the most promising policy options to reduce welfare...

In June 2015, about 53,000 people were affected by unusually severe floods in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana. The real impact of such a disaster is a product of exposure ( "Who was affected?" ), vulnerability ( "How much did the affected households lose?" ), and socioeconomic...

Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of assets or property) and...

Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. This paper proposes an expanded risk assessment based on a framework that adds socioeconomic resilience and uses wellbeing losses as the main measure of disaster severity. Using an agent-based...

Assuming that capital productivity is higher in areas at risk from natural hazards (such as coastal zones or flood plains), this paper shows that rapid development in these areas -- and the resulting increase in disaster losses -- may be the consequence of a rational and well-informed trade-off...