The role of infrastructure, socio-economic development, and food security to mitigate the loss of natural disasters

Abstract

This study shows the impact of risk (hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) and resilience (infrastructure, information and communication technology, institutional quality, food security, women empowerment, economic performance, human capital, emergency workforce, and social capital) indicators on losses due to natural disasters in 24 high-income, 24 upper-middle-income, 30 lower-middle-income, and 12 low-income countries from 1995 to 2019. It develops a new disaster risk index and disaster resilience index using standard index-making procedure (indicators selection, winsorization, normalization, aggregation). The generalized additive modeling was used to explore the non-linear relationship between response and explanatory variables. There exists a positive link between damage due to natural disasters and hazard index (all panels) and exposure index in high-income countries. The decrease in damage due to natural disasters was observed due to an increase in infrastructure (upper-middle-, lower-middle-, and low-income countries), information and communication technology (high-income countries), institutional quality (high-income countries), food security (high- and upper-middle-income countries), women empowerment (lower-middle-income countries), economic performance (high- and low-income countries), human capital (low-income countries), and emergency workforce (upper-middle and lower-middle-income countries). The governments should enhance disaster resilience through Sendai Framework, having seven targets and four priority areas to increase disaster resilience.

Keywords: Disaster risk reduction; Generalized additive model; Natural disasters; Resilience; Sendai framework; Sustainable development.