Understanding the distributional effects of recurrent floods in the Philippines

Successful recovery from extreme weather events is key to avoid long-term poverty implications. Yet, in disaster prone regions, there may not always be enough time to recover between events. There is a common narrative that the resulting incomplete recoveries aggravate adverse impacts, but approaches allowing for a systematic quantitative assessment are missing. Here, we extend an agent-based model to study welfare effects in the Philippines depending on household exposure and income. We find that incomplete recoveries increase cumulative consumption and well-being losses across the study period 2000–2018 by 40%. While low-income households suffer the highest well-being losses, the effect of incomplete recoveries is most relevant for middle-income households. Consequently, losses can be critically underestimated when drawing conclusions about the impacts of recurrent events based on the impacts of individual events. Accounting for incomplete recoveries may help to better prepare for an intensification of extreme events under climate change.