Unbreakable: Mapping priorities for disaster risk reduction and resilience building

This report moves beyond asset and production losses, focusing instead on how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. This represents an improvement over the traditional metrics, as well-being captures more fully the effects of natural disaster risk and losses on poor and nonpoor people, even when the economic losses of poor people are small in absolute terms. The assessment framework outlined in Unbreakable can be used to design coherent, effective disaster risk management policies and projects, and to ensure that allocations of investments and other resources improve the well-being of all people and are not systematically driven toward wealthier areas and individuals.

In this report, the well-being metric is used to assess the benefits of 11 different disaster risk management policies in 117 countries. The policies can be grouped into two pillars: traditional approaches that reduce risks to avoid disasters, and resilience-building approaches, which improve the ability of populations to manage disasters that cannot be avoided. In all of the 117 countries studied, well-being losses from natural disasters are larger than asset losses. Globally, poor people are disproportionately affected by these losses: the poorest 20% experience only 11% of total asset losses, but 47% of wellbeing losses annually. Thus, poor people experience asset losses that are only half of the average, but well-being losses that are more than twice as large.

The report lists the countries that can benefit most from each of the 11 disaster risk management policies considered. In absolute terms, the largest and highest-risk countries could achieve the largest gains by implementing almost any of the policies. Relative to their GDPs, however, the benefits of effective disaster risk management policies can be even greater in smaller countries, achieving well-being benefits that far outweigh their costs.

This report is an appendix to the main report Unbreakable: Building the resilience of the poor in the face of natural disasters.