Economic impacts of storm surge events: examining state and national ripple effects

Meri Davlasheridze (), Qin Fan, Wesley Highfield and Jiaochen Liang
Additional contact information
Meri Davlasheridze: Texas A&M University at Galveston
Qin Fan: California State University, Fresno
Wesley Highfield: Texas A&M University at Galveston
Jiaochen Liang: California State University, Fresno

Climatic Change, 2021, vol. 166, issue 1, No 11, 20 pages

Abstract: Abstract Understanding socioeconomic consequences of natural disasters both locally and nationally is critical in assessing and informing mitigation strategies to combat future catastrophic threats. We develop a state-level computable general equilibrium model and assess the vulnerability of state and US national economies to surge events affecting coastal communities and strategic industrial assets including petroleum and chemical manufacturing in the south-eastern region of Texas. In addition to enumerating these impacts, our model also assesses loss avoidance associated with one kind of adaptation strategy, a storm surge suppression system, that has been proposed for the region to address growing concerns over storm surge inundation. Our results indicate persistent and adverse long-term impacts of storm surge events on the economies of Texas and the USA without the surge suppression system. Importantly, while neighboring states may temporarily benefit from substitution effects and reallocation of resources, the majority of states will suffer welfare losses as a result of surge-induced impacts in Texas. Adjusting impacts by storms’ return probabilities, the average annualized decline in Texas Gross State Product is approximately 0.05% in 2066, corresponding to $5 billion, while welfare and personal income will decline by 0.05% and 0.04%, respectively. Model simulations with the storm suppression system indicate moderation in negative impacts. Our research provides a modeling framework for assessing economic impacts of disasters and further contributes to estimating ripple effects on national and regional economies.

Keywords: Storm surge; CGE model; Economic impacts; Natural disasters; Mitigation; Coastal spine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-021-03106-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:166:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10584-021-03106-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-021-03106-z

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().