Economic Losses From Natural Disasters: Quantification Approaches And Developments In Asian Countries

Natural disasters, by definition, cause great damage, destruction and human suffering. Estimating the associated economic losses is crucial, as this information supports decision-making in the immediate follow-up period of disaster events, but also for the development of long-term mitigation strategies. To better understand what is meant by economic losses from natural disasters and how to quantify them, we propose a classification and present associated economic quantification approaches. In a second, more practical oriented part, we use statistics from an international natural disaster database to analyze disaster events and the underlying losses occurring in Asian countries. Amongst other, we find that huge disaster losses and fatalities are associated with individual major events of particular types. After normalizing losses with GDP and fatalities with population count, the ranking of the most affected countries changed from more developed to less developed countries. We finish by giving some recommendations on how to improve the availability and quality of disaster-related loss estimates.