Global socio-economic resilience to disasters

Abstract Most disaster risk assessments use asset damages as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and affected people’s coping and recovery capacity. To address this, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset damages without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. Here we provide a global picture of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience using microsimulations. Across 132 countries, 1 dollar in damages causes well-being losses equivalent to a 2-dollar uniform national consumption drop. The poorest populations incur only 9% of damages but 33% of well-being losses. A 10% higher gross domestic product per capita is associated with a 1 percentage point resilience increase. Low-income countries experience 72% greater well-being losses per dollar of damages and need 92% longer to recover than high-income countries. Socio-economic and financial interventions can complement asset-focused policies, and targeting low-income populations usually yields higher well-being returns. Our results offer a starting point for a discussion on more comprehensive risk metrics and risk management policies for sustainable development.