![]() The Economic Factors Pushing People to Risky Areas In the rest of this paper, this ability will be referred to as “socioeconomic resilience” and will play a key role in explaining why poor people are disproportionally affected by natural disasters (Fig. After all, experiencing asset losses is not so much of a problem, if the affected people can easily and painlessly replace the lost assets and move on with their lives. To better understand the impact of natural hazards on people’s well-being, this paper extends risk assessment to include the ability of the affected population to cope with and recover from disaster losses. It does so by mobilizing the standard framework for risk assessments, which focuses on: (i) hazard-the probability of an event occurring (ii) exposure-the population and assets located in an affected area (iii) asset vulnerability-the asset value lost when affected by a hazard.īut this paper goes beyond these traditional factors, which describe the risk to assets-that is, the average monetary value of the damages that disasters inflict on assets (often measured as replacement or repair value) and other direct impacts of disasters. 2016c, b, c, 2018) and investigates these questions to identify the main drivers of the relatively higher vulnerability of poor people. This paper builds on recent World Bank reports (Hallegatte et al. Is it because they are more likely to live in place affected by natural hazards? Is it because they are experiencing larger losses when they are affected? Is it because they struggle to replace the lost assets? However, to guide policies and better prioritize action to manage natural hazards, it is useful to go beyond the generic statement (“poor people are disproportionally affected”) and investigate the various factors that make poor people more vulnerable. Almost by definition, poor people are more vulnerable to shocks, regardless of their origin: because they are poor, any impact on their asset or consumption level threaten subsistence and long-term prospects, and they have less resources to reduce risks or cope with the shock when it occurs. In many ways, it is obvious that poor people are disproportionally affected by natural disasters.
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