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ESPON-TITAN Territorial Impacts of Natural Disasters

This report for ESPON (the European Spatial Planning Observation Network) assesses the economic impact of droughts, windstorms, floods and earthquakes on European countries and regions.

Focusing on the impacts of frequency, regional distributions and the individual and cumulative impacts, Cambridge Econometrics estimated the extent of direct and indirect impacts of these major natural disasters over the period of 1995-2017.

The economic impact analysis formed part of a wider research consortium, culminating in this final report by ESPON TITAN.

Flooding - ESPON TITAN
ESPON-TITAN Territorial Impacts of Natural Disasters

Final Report

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Key Findings

1
Indirect economic impacts, in specific regions and economic sectors tend to be almost as large as direct economic impacts of disaster events.
3
Central and Eastern European and South-Eastern European countries tend to be relatively more affected by these types of natural hazards, in economic terms (damages in proportion of their regional gross value added, GVA), than most other parts of Europe.
5
Flood and windstorm natural disasters have had the largest negative impact on economic output in almost all analysed years across the European territory. At the same time, results suggest that heavy earthquake events, despite being rare, tend to result in significant economic losses compared to the other event types.
2
Supply chains, represented by the input-output linkages, are highly important in distributing the economic impacts from directly impacted regions to the “economically” closer, but directly not affected regions.
4
Whilst the overall frequency of natural disasters is consistent across richer and poorer European countries, the institutional systems and infrastructural endowments tend to be less equipped to prepare and protect against the impacts of a natural disasters. This is apparent through higher human cost from natural disaster events.

Get in Touch

DF-1

Dóra Fazekas

Managing Director (Hungary)

t: +36 1 882 3500

e:df@camecon.com

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