Introduction And Overview

Natural disasters like earthquakes, typhoons, wildfires, floods, volcanic eruptions, can have consequences far beyond physical and economic damages leading to disruptions on communities, societies and peoples’ lives and livelihood options. In current times, since we live in a highly globalized world where the lives, livelihoods and businesses of peoples, communities, and nations are deeply interconnected, natural disasters’ adverse consequences can be profound on multiple fronts — with cross cutting implications over regions, time and sectors. One of the implications of a global economy is that major catastrophic events can disrupt economies far beyond the local ones in terms of global infrastructure, since worldwide businesses can also be impacted due to their interconnected supply chains and markets following the aftermath. As an example, the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami and the 2011 Thailand floods demonstrated to the world that although the events seemed to cause relatively localized damage to individual countries, they had far wider indirect economic implications through market disruptions caused by supply chain reactions, among others…