
Stéphane HallegatteWorld Bank · Sustainable Development Network
Stéphane Hallegatte
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407
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (407)
Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. When these events occur, they threaten lives and livelihoods. Here we estimate the global population at high risk from climate-related hazards by examining household level vulnerability and local exposure to four types of events: droughts, floods, heatwaves and cycl...
Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. When these events occur, they threaten lives and livelihoods. Here we estimate the global population at high risk from climate-related hazards by examining household level vulnerability and local exposure to four types of events: agricultural droughts in rural areas...
We offer an updated and comprehensive review of recent studies on the impacts of climate change, particularly global warming, on poverty and inequality, paying special attention to data sources as well as empirical methods. While studies consistently find negative impacts of higher temperatures on poverty across different geographical regions, with...
The political and institutional feasibility of implementing climate policy appears as a key impediment to accelerating climate action. Drawing on a rich dataset of climate policies introduced globally over the last 50 years, this paper explores global patterns in climate policy adoption to understand how climate policy feasibility is shaped by coun...
Growing consumption is both necessary to end extreme poverty¹and one of the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions², creating a potential tension between alleviating poverty and limiting global warming. Most poverty reduction has historically occurred because of economic growth3–6, which means that reducing poverty entails increasing not only the...
Disaster losses are increasing and evidence is mounting that climate change is driving up the probability of extreme natural shocks1–3. Yet it has also proved politically expedient to invoke climate change as an exogenous force that supposedly places disasters beyond the influence of local and national authorities4,5. However, locally determined pa...
Every country relies on a well-functioning road system. However, we do not have a clear understanding yet of the vulnerability of each of these road networks to different forms of disruption. In this study, we aim to better understand how road networks are affected by different disruptive events, to identify hotspots of road network vulnerabilities...
Ensuring a more equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide is an effective strategy to control global pandemics and support economic recovery. We analyze the socioeconomic effects - defined as health gains, lockdown-easing effect, and supply-chain rebuilding benefit - of a set of idealized COVID-19 vaccine distribution scenarios. We find that an...
Previous studies have explored potential conflicts between ending poverty and limiting global warming by focusing on the carbon emissions linked to the consumption of the world’s poorest. Here we instead focus on economic growth as the main driver of poverty alleviation and estimate the emissions associated with the economic growth needed to eradic...
This paper investigates the land value creation potential from flood mitigation investments in a theoretical and applied setting, using the urban area of Buenos Aires as a case study. It contributes to the literature on the wider economic benefits of government interventions and the dividends of resilience investments. Using a simple urban economic...
As countries urbanize, human settlements are rapidly expanding into hazardous flood zones. This study provides a global analysis of spatial urbanization patterns and the evolution of flood exposure between 1985 and 2015. Using high-resolution annual data, it shows that settlements across the world grew by 85 percent to over 1.28 million square kilo...
Ensuring a more equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide is an effective strategy to control the COVID-19 pandemic and support global economic recovery. Here, we analyze the socioeconomic effects - defined as health gains, lockdown-easing benefit, and supply-chain rebuilding benefit - of a set of idealized vaccine distribution scenarios, by cou...
As development and adaptation are closely intertwined, assessing the benefits of adaptation by focusing only on how it reduces climate impacts could lead to misleading policy advice. In some cases, trying to minimize climate impacts could lead to inferior outcomes. It is preferable to explore how policies influence the absolute level of metrics of...
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 eco...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a massive economic shock across the world due to business interruptions and shutdowns from social-distancing measures. To evaluate the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 on individuals, a micro-economic model is developed to estimate the direct impact of distancing on household income, savings, consumption, and pover...
Some actions intended to adapt to climate change may do more harm than good, especially when they consume energy, making it more difficult to shift to decarbonized energy, or when, in meeting the needs of one group of people, they increase the vulnerability of others. Heat wave risk provides a typical example: air conditioning (AC) equipment may tr...
Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. Here, an expanded risk assessment is proposed based on a framework that adds “socioeconomic resilience” — that is, the ability of affected households to cope with and recover from disaster asset losses — and uses “wellbeing losses” as its main me...
Natural disaster risk assessments typically consider environmental hazard and physical damage, neglecting to quantify how asset losses affect households’ well-being. However, for a given asset loss, a wealthy household might quickly recover, while a poor household might suffer major, long-lasting impacts. This research proposes a methodology to qua...
Countries have sought to stop the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) by severely restricting travel and in-person commercial activities. Here, we analyse the supply-chain effects of a set of idealized lockdown scenarios, using the latest global trade modelling framework. We find that supply-chain losses that are related to initial COVID-...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a massive economic shock across the world due to business interruptions and shutdowns from social-distancing measures. To evaluate the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 on individuals, a micro-economic model is developed to estimate the direct impact of distancing on household income, savings, consumption, and povert...
In a world of increasingly integrated supply chains, disasters have impacts far from where they hit. A new paper looks at how tropical-cyclone impacts propagate across cities, showing that indirect impacts become large for the most-destructive storms.
Countries around the world have sought to stop the spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) by severely restricting travel and in-person commercial activities. Here, we analyse the economic footprint of such “lockdowns” using detailed datasets of global supply chains and a set of pandemic scenarios. We find that COVID-related economic losses...
In June 2015, about 53,000 people were affected by unusually severe floods in Accra, 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 resilience (“What was their ability to cope and recover?”). This study explores these three dim...
Poor people are disproportionally affected by natural hazards and disasters. This paper provides a review of the multiple factors that explain why this is the case. It explores the role of exposure (often, but not always, poor people are more likely to be affected by hazards), vulnerability (when they are affected, poor people tend to lose a larger...
The welfare impact of a natural disaster depends on its effect on consumption, not only on the direct asset losses and human losses that are usually estimated and reported after disasters. This chapter proposes a framework to assess disaster-related consumption losses, starting from an estimate of the asset losses, and leading to the following find...
Background
In 2016, 23% of children younger than 5 years were stunted. Global-level modelling has consistently found that climate change impacts on food production are likely to impair progress on reducing undernutrition. We adopt a new perspective, assessing how climate change may affect child stunting via its impacts on two interacting socioecono...
Natural disasters affect supply chains in complex ways that traditional economic models at the sector level cannot capture. An agent-based model representing firm-to-firm interactions demonstrates that these interactions magnify the economic cost of disasters.
This guidance document provides direction to effective drought hazard and risk assessments. It is based on a new extensive inventory of drought models and tools, made available through www.droughtcatalogue.com, and a technical evaluation of these models on a set of case studies. The guidance note will hopefully provide the reader with a good overvi...
Transport infrastructure is exposed to natural hazards all around the world. Here we present the first global estimates of multi-hazard exposure and risk to road and rail infrastructure. Results reveal that ~27% of all global road and railway assets are exposed to at least one hazard and ~7.5% of all assets are exposed to a 1/100 year flood event....
The economy of the United Republic of Tanzania is growing fast but remains vulnerable to disasters, which are likely to worsen with climate change. Its transportation system, which mainly consist of roads, often get disrupted by floods. How could the resilience of the transportation infrastructures be improved? We formulate a new type of model, cal...
Natural disaster risk assessments typically consider environmental hazard and physical damage, neglecting to quantify how asset losses affect households’ well-being. However, for a given asset loss, a wealthy household might easily recover, while a poor household might suffer from major, long-lasting impacts. Ignoring such differential impacts can...
Infrastructure systems form the backbone of every society, providing essential services that include energy, water, waste management, transport and telecommunications. Infrastructure can also create harmful social and environmental impacts, increase vulnerability to natural disasters and leave an unsustainable burden of debt. Investment in infrastr...