Abstract

Viewed at the local level disaster risk reveals a complexity that is essentially invisible when observed from a global perspective, but which is critical to understanding both risk dynamics and disaster risk–poverty interactions. National disaster databases contain disaster loss reports aggregated at the local government level. Databases from a sample of 12 Asian and Latin American countries document a total of 126,620 such reports between 1970 and 20072 and show that, as at the global level, mortality and direct economic loss are highly concentrated. Just 0.7 per cent of the reports cover 84 per cent of the total mortality and 75 per cent of the destroyed housing across the 12 countries. In contrast, other risk attributes are more evenly spread. For example, 51 per cent of housing damage is distributed across the other 125,632 loss reports. These patterns illustrate concentrations of intensive risk and geographically dispersed patterns of extensive risk. The first part of this chapter opens a window on both kinds of risk, viewed at the local level. The second part then examines the empirical evidence on how poverty is translated into disaster risk and how disaster impacts are translated into poverty outcomes at the same scale.