The nexus between natural disasters and energy technological innovation is of great importance in the energy technology innovation theory and related literature. This research thus investigates the ...influence of natural disasters on energy technology innovation by using panel data technology from 1975 to 2018 for the samples of 29 OECD countries and first finds that natural disasters may have a significantly negative impact on energy technology innovation, which not only is impactful in the year of the natural disasters, but also lasts over the next 4 years. In addition, the effects of natural shocks on energy innovation appears to be weaken by greater economic development, trade openness, financial openness, interpersonal globalization and government stability. Furthermore, epidemic has the biggest negative impact on energy innovation. Finally, natural disasters are significantly negatively related to low-carbon energy innovation, but not related to non-low carbon energy innovation. Overall, the findings provide a research reference for how the policy makers can improve the level of energy innovation in the face of natural disasters and environmental sustainability.
•This research investigates the relationships between natural disasters, energy innovation and environmental sustainability.•By using two-way fixed effect model based on panel data technology from 1975 to 2018 for the samples of 29 OECD countries.•We find that the occurrence of natural disasters has a significantly adverse effect on energy technology innovation.•We further examine the impact of natural disasters on energy innovation lagging 1–5 years.
Despite the tremendous human suffering caused by natural disasters, their effects on economic growth remain unclear, with some studies reporting negative, and others indicating no or even positive ...effects. To reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings reported in the literature, this study explores the effects of natural disasters on growth separately by disaster and economic sector. Applying a dynamic generalized method of moments panel estimator to a 1961–2005 cross-country panel dataset, three major insights emerge. First, disasters do affect economic growth but not always negatively, with effects that differ across types of disasters and economic sectors. Second, although moderate disasters (such as moderate floods) can have a positive growth effect in some sectors, severe disasters do not. Third, growth in developing countries is more sensitive to natural disasters than in developed ones, with more sectors affected and the effects larger and economically meaningful.
Wildfire risk, salience & housing demand McCoy, Shawn J.; Walsh, Randall P.
Journal of environmental economics and management,
09/2018, Letnik:
91
Journal Article
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In this paper we develop a parsimonious model that links underlying changes in location-specific risk perceptions to housing market dynamics. Given estimates of both the price and quantity effects ...induced by shocks to agents' beliefs, the model allows us to draw inferences about the underlying changes in risk perceptions that gave rise to observed housing market dynamics. We apply the model's predictions to an empirical analysis of the influence of severe wildfires on housing prices and sales rates in the Front Range of Colorado. Interpreted in the context of the model, our empirical results suggest that natural disasters lead to significant, but short-lived increases in risk perceptions.
We examine natural disasters and long-run climatic factors as potential determinants of international migration, implementing a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows from 1960 to 2000. We find ...no direct effect of long-run climatic factors on international migration across our entire sample. These results are robust when conditioning on origin-country characteristics, when considering migrants returning home, and when accounting for the potential endogeneity of migrant networks. Rather, we find evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors operating through wages. We find that epidemics and miscellaneous incidents spur international migration, and there is strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs.
We investigate whether experiencing a natural disaster affects risk-taking behavior. We conduct standard risk games (using real money) with randomly selected individuals in rural Indonesia. We find ...that individuals who recently suffered a flood or earthquake exhibit more risk-aversion. Experiencing a natural disaster causes people to perceive that they now face a greater risk of a future disaster. We conclude that this change in perception of background risk causes people to take fewer risks. We provide evidence that experimental risk behavior is correlated with real-life risk behavior, highlighting the importance of our results.
Hurricanes are the most destructive natural disasters in the United States. The record of economic damage from hurricanes shows a steep positive trend dominated by increases in wealth. It is ...necessary to account for temporal changes in exposed wealth, in a process called normalization, before we can compare the destructiveness of recorded damaging storms from different areas and at different times. Atmospheric models predict major hurricanes to get more intense as Earth warms, and we expect this trend to eventually emerge above the natural variability in the record of normalized damage. However, the evidence for an increasing trend in normalized damage since 1900 has been controversial. In this study, we develop a record of normalized damage since 1900 based on an equivalent area of total destruction. Here, we show that this record has an improved signal-to-noise ratio over earlier normalization schemes based on calculations of present-day economic damage. Our data reveal an emergent positive trend in damage, which we attribute to a detectable change in extreme storms due to global warming. Moreover, we show that this increasing trend in damage can also be exposed in existing normalized damage records by looking at the frequency of the largest damage events. Our record of normalized damage, framed in terms of an equivalent area of total destruction, is a more reliable measure for climate-related changes in extreme weather, and can be used for better risk assessments on hurricane disasters.
Urban resilience Glaeser, Edward L
Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland),
01/2022, Letnik:
59, Številka:
1
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Will COVID-19 end the urban renaissance that many cities have experienced since the 1980s? This essay selectively reviews the copious literature that now exists on the long-term impact of natural ...disasters. At this point, the long-run resilience of cities to many forms of physical destruction, including bombing, earthquakes and fires, has been well-documented. The destruction of human capital may leave a longer imprint, but cities have persisted through many plagues over the past millennia. By contrast, economic and political shocks, including deindustrialisation or the loss of capital city status, can enormously harm an urban area. These facts suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic will only significantly alter urban fortunes if it is accompanied by a major economic shift, such as widespread adoption of remote work, or political shifts that could lead businesses and the wealthy to leave urban areas. The combination of an increased ability to relocate with increased local redistribution or deterioration of local amenity levels, or both, could recreate some of the key attributes of the urban crisis of the 1970s.
The Gold Coast is a bustling region in South East Queensland with a large concentration of people and has dynamic and growing business and tourism activity. The region is subject to thunderstorms and ...tropical cyclones that can generate damaging winds. The Severe Wind Hazard Assessment for South East Queensland evaluates the risk posed by severe winds and has strategies for managing this risk (Edwards et al. 2022). Results from the most recent assessment showed that older residential houses were the most damaged by severe winds and that this contributed disproportionately to community risk. However, lessons from recent wind damage caused by Tropical Cyclone Seroja in Western Australia in 2021 indicated that modern house designs have important vulnerabilities. These findings are a concern for any exposed coastal area and, in particular, for South East Queensland. This paper presents a suite of scenarios developed to address this vulnerability. Specifically, we describe how emergency and disaster managers can conduct capability analyses with the goal to enhance intelligence and planning capabilities. An example of the City of Gold Coast was used to show how it has leveraged these capabilities to improve emergency risk-based planning and begin a community resilience transformation with effective places of refuge and evacuation centres for the community.
•A cyclone is used to identify the impact of disasters on subjective expectations.•Affected Indo-Fijians anticipate larger and more frequent future disasters.•Risk perceptions of affected indigenous ...Fijians are unaltered.•These results are consistent with differing cultural and social safety nets.•Both groups over-infer risk, regardless of whether or not they suffered losses.
Natural disasters give rise to loss and damage and may affect subjective expectations about the prevalence and severity of future disasters. These expectations might then in turn shape individuals’ investment behaviors, potentially affecting their incomes in subsequent years. As part of an emerging literature on endogenous preferences, economists have begun studying the consequences that exposure to natural disasters have on risk attitudes, perceptions, and behavior. We add to this field by studying the impact of being struck by the December 2012 Cyclone Evan on Fijian households’ risk attitudes and subjective expectations about the likelihood and severity of natural disasters over the next 20 years. The randomness of the cyclone’s path allows us to estimate the causal effects of exposure on both risk attitudes and risk perceptions. Our results show that being struck by an extreme event substantially changes individuals’ risk perceptions as well as their beliefs about the frequency and magnitude of future shocks. However, we find sharply distinct results for the two ethnicities in our sample, indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians; the impact of the natural disaster aligns with previous results in the literature on risk attitudes and risk perceptions for Indo-Fijians, whereas they have little to no impact on those same measures for indigenous Fijians.
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