Social accounting for disaster preparedness and recovery planning

ABSTRACT

This report describes the first two phases of a project to develop a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) modeling system as a tool for assessing the economic damage arising from natural disasters and for helping to devise recovery strategies. The resulting system may be used to design proactive strategies for regions known to be vulnerable to specific natural disaster (such as exrthquakes and hurricanes), as well as to assess as to damage and aid recovery in localities which have suffered an unanticipated disaster. This report describes the methods used to construct and the SAM, based on the work in a small Caribbean island. This study shows that a suitable SAM model which takes account of the destructive effects of a disaster can be constructed rather rapidly, and that this model can reproduce the events of an economic disaster and recovery for employment and income over an extended period. Special attention has been paid to the lifeline sectors. More detailed versions of the model to account for the differential impacts across social groups by occupation, education, geography and demography among the affected regions population are also described.(AU)