Valuing disaster risk reduction neighborhood interventions in informal settlements of Latin American and the Caribbean

Department

Economics, Finance and Quantitative Analysis

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2020

Abstract

© 2020 Arrieta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This study assesses the dollar benefit of a neighborhood approach intervention on disaster risk reduction in small-sized, densely populated, and hazard-prone informal settlements across Latin American and Caribbean countries. We use a life satisfaction approach that assigns a dollar value to gains in wellbeing associated with the neighborhood approach intervention. Our primary data was a survey to a sample of 349 beneficiaries from small towns in Haiti, Guatemala, and Jamaica, and in major cities’ surrounded areas of Peru, Colombia, and Honduras. Out of 14 interventions, we found that community empowerment, physical works in public spaces and urban gardens/food approaches produced a gain of USD1,038 to USD1,241 to individual beneficiaries. Our study suggests a large benefit associated with the neighborhood approach intervention. It also shows that the life satisfaction approach is a promising method for the valuation of non-market and public goods, especially for countries where data on hazards and risks is not available to help monetize risk reductions.

Journal Title

PLoS ONE

Volume

15

Issue

11 November

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1371/journal.pone.0242409

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