Effects of disaster risk reduction on socio-economic development and poverty reduction

Investments in disaster risk reduction not only reduce damage, but also promote social and eco-nomic development. While there are many methods of evaluating investments in disaster risk re-duction, most methods are based on losses and benefits to the entire region, and the differences in the benefits for different social classes are unclear. Therefore, it is difficult to ascertain the impact on the poor, who are particularly severely affected by disasters. Here, we present a method for as-sessing the impact of disaster risk reduction investments on the poor based on case study data from Bago, Myanmar, including interviews with 440 households. The results show that by consid-ering the development of the poor, the benefits of investment in disaster risk reduction can in-crease by similar to 4.4 times. Although there is uncertainty in modeling such a complex system, the re-sults demonstrate the need to consider both the direct and indirect impacts of disaster risk reduc-tion investments, for facilitating sustainable development in developing countries.