Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten
Shore brings to life the individual and
collective voices of a community: victims, volunteers, and state
and federal agencies that came together to rebuild ...the Bayshore
after the Superstorm Sandy in 2013.
After the tumultuous night of October 29, 2012, the residents of
Monmouth, Ocean, and Atlantic Counties faced an enormous and
pressing question: What to do? The stories captured in this book
encompass their answer to that question: the clean-up efforts, the
work with governmental and non-governmental aid agencies, and the
fraught choices concerning rebuilding. Through a rich and varied
set of oral histories that provide perspective on disaster
planning, response, and recovery in New Jersey, Abigail Perkiss
captures the experience of these individuals caught in between
short-term preparedness initiatives that municipal and state
governments undertook and the long-term planning decisions that
created the conditions for catastrophic property damage.
Through these stories, Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's
Forgotten Shore lays bare the ways that climate change and sea
level rise are creating critical vulnerabilities in the most
densely populated areas in the nation, illuminating the human toll
of disaster and the human capacity for resilience.
This paper reviews the empirical literature on the economic impacts of natural disasters to inform both the modeling of potential future climate damages and climate adaptation policy related to ...extreme events. It covers papers that estimate the short- and/or long-run economic impacts of weather-related extreme events as well as studies identifying the determinants of the magnitude of those damages (including fatalities). The paper also reviews the small number of empirical papers on the potential extent of adaptation in response to changing extreme events.
This research shows that natural disasters may hurt energy consumption by using data on 123 countries over the period 1990–2015 and classifying them according to their economic development level and ...region based on World Development Indicators. We employ a two-step system-GMM method to examine the effect of natural disasters on energy consumption, presenting findings that support our hypotheses in the models and show a strong negative effect for low-income countries or those in the Africa region. After considering an alternative proxy for natural disaster, we implement quantile regression methods. Their results find that natural disasters exhibit a negative and significant impact on oil, renewable, and nuclear energy consumptions. The quantile regression models used in the robustness check present that the effects are stronger for low-level energy consumption economies.
•Natural disasters exhibit a negative impact on oil, renewable, and nuclear consumptions.•This negative impact clearly appears in low-income countries or in Africa region.•Different natural disasters and energy sources affect the disaster-energy consumption nexus.•Provide policy implications for governments, policy-makers, and researchers.
Natural disasters constitute a persistent threat to economic welfare in many places, particularly in developing countries. Not only can disasters transform living circumstances, but we provide ...evidence here that they can lead to important changes in individual preferences. In a series of experiments that we conducted in rural Thailand, we find that the 2004 tsunami led to substantial long-lasting increases in risk aversion, prosocial behavior, and impatience. We use GIS data and survey responses to identify disaster impact, showing that both community-level and individual-level experiences appear to affect preferences in theoretically plausible ways. Our findings have important implications for public policy efforts to address natural disasters.
Best practices in post-disaster housing and community reconstruction are constantly evolving. Technology is changing how reconstruction is done, as is the frequency and severity of the disasters ...themselves. Reconstruction projects are increasingly focused on the need to reduce future risks by ensuring that what is rebuilt is safer and more disaster-resilient than what was there before. The expanding role of communities in managing community reconstruction, with financial and technical assistance from government, is another way reconstruction is changing.Safer Homes, Stronger Communities: A Handbook for Reconstructing after Natural Disasters provides advice on how to ensure that reconstruction empowers communities to rebuild, and gives them the support they need to build back in a way that the risk of future disasters is greatly reduced. Written for policy makers and project managers engaged in major housing and community reconstruction programs, the handbook provides guidance on the roles and responsibilities of various actors, and explains what the scope of a reconstruction policy should be and how decisions in each aspect of reconstruction contribute to larger reconstruction goals. For project managers who will be charged with implementing reconstruction policy, the handbook provides guidance on the options that should be considered in each aspect of reconstruction, and examples of where they have been used in other reconstruction projects. It includes more than one hundred short case studies collected from global experts with recent experience in housing reconstruction, that illustrate how the policies and practical ideas have been used on the ground. It also includes links to extensive technical information on the topics covered by the handbook.
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 occurred in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan's Tohoku region. The Great East Japan Earthquake was the first disaster ever recorded that ...included an earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear power plant accident, a power supply failure, and a large-scale disruption of supply chains. This report consolidates the set of 36 Knowledge Notes, research results of the joint study undertaken by the Government of Japan and the World Bank. It summarizes the lessons learned from the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and provides guidance to other disaster-prone countries for mainstreaming disaster risk management in their development policies. It is clear that financial resources alone are not sufficient to deal with disasters and to spur development. Technical assistance and capacity building are equally important. In Japan's case, the project learned how communities can play a critical role in preparing for and coping with natural disasters. Communities can help prevent damage from spreading, maintain social order, and provide support to the vulnerable. Only through technical cooperation can such know-how be passed on to other countries and be adapted to their local circumstances. The chapters that make up the main body of this report are built around the disciplines employed in the traditional disaster risk management cycle. Grouped into seven thematic clusters that track that cycle, the chapters treat structural measures (part 1) and nonstructural measures (part 2) as preventive options. Also covered is the emergency responses put in place after March 11 (part 3) and described the planning behind the reconstruction process (part 4). The handling of risk assessment and communication before and after the disaster are the subject of part 5. Part 6 deals with risk financing, insurance, and fiscal and financial management; part 7 with the progress of recovery and relocation.
The electricity infrastructure is a critical lifeline system and of utmost importance to our daily lives. Power system resilience characterizes the ability to resist, adapt to, and timely recover ...from disruptions. The resilient power system is intended to cope with low probability, high risk extreme events including extreme natural disasters and man-made attacks. With an increasing awareness of such threats, the resilience of power systems has become a top priority for many countries. Facing the pressing urgency for resilience studies, the objective of this paper is to investigate the resilience of power systems. It summarizes practices taken by governments, utilities, and researchers to increase power system resilience. Based on a thorough review on the existing metrics system and evaluation methodologies, we present the concept, metrics, and a quantitative framework for power system resilience evaluation. Then, system hardening strategies and smart grid technologies as means to increase system resilience are discussed, with an emphasis on the new technologies such as topology reconfiguration, microgrids, and distribution automation; to illustrate how to increase system resilience against extreme events, we propose a load restoration framework based on smart distribution technology. The proposed method is applied on two test systems to validify its effectiveness. In the end, challenges to the power system resilience are discussed, including extreme event modeling, practical barriers, interdependence with other critical infrastructures, etc.
We study the influence of natural disasters on technological innovation for a panel of 49 countries. After controlling for endogeneity issues and using several measures of natural disasters ...(occurrences, deaths, affected people, and economic damages) we find that natural disasters have a significantly negative effect on technological innovation. We also study the disaggregated effects of natural disasters and find that earthquakes, extreme temperatures, floods, and storms influence innovations most.
Using corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings for 23,000 companies from 114 countries, we find that a firm's CSR rating and its country's legal origin are strongly correlated. Legal origin is a ...stronger explanation than "doing good by doing well" factors or firm and country characteristics (ownership concentration, political institutions, and globalization): firms from common law countries have lower CSR than companies from civil law countries, with Scandinavian civil law firms having the highest CSR ratings. Evidence from quasi-natural experiments such as scandals and natural disasters suggests that civil law firms are more responsive to CSR shocks than common law firms.
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