Socioeconomic Resilience in Sri Lanka : Natural Disaster Poverty and Wellbeing Impact Assessment
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 me...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/173611568643337991/Socioeconomic-Resilience-in-Sri-Lanka-Natural-Disaster-Poverty-and-Wellbeing-Impact-Assessment http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32423 |
| Summary: | 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 model that represents
explicitly the recovery and reconstruction process at the
household level, this risk assessment provides new insights
into disaster risks in Sri Lanka. The analysis indicates
that regular flooding events can move tens of thousands of
Sri Lankans into transient poverty at once, hindering the
country's recent progress on poverty eradication and
shared prosperity. As metrics of disaster impacts, poverty
incidence and well-being losses facilitate quantification of
the benefits of interventions like rapid post-disaster
support and adaptive social protection systems. Such
investments efficiently reduce wellbeing losses by making
exposed and vulnerable populations more resilient.
Nationally and on average, the bottom income quintile
suffers only 7 percent of the total asset losses but 32
percent of the total wellbeing losses. Average annual
wellbeing losses due to fluvial flooding in Sri Lanka are
estimated at US$119 million per year, more than double the
asset losses of US$78 million. Asset losses are reported to
be highly concentrated in Colombo district, and wellbeing
losses are more widely distributed throughout the country.
Finally, the paper applies the socioeconomic resilience
framework to a cost-benefit analysis of prospective adaptive
social protection systems, based on enrollment in Samurdhi,
the main social support system in Sri Lanka. |
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