Evaluation of Effective Measures to Prevent the Vicious Circle of Poverty Accelerated by Flood: A Case Study in Bago City, Myanmar

Abstract:

Poor people are severely damaged by disasters because of their high vulnerability and lack of socio-economic resilience. This makes it more difficult for them to get out of poverty. Therefore, it is important to invest in disaster risk management to save them from this vicious circle of poverty.

However, investment in disaster risk management is a low priority in developing countries. Even if the investment is made, the measures usually aim to reduce the aggregated loss in the whole society. Such measures oftentimes failed to take into account the demand of the poor, whose absolute amount of damage is small. Hence, there is a need to develop a new method of evaluating measures which take the poor into consideration and contribute to poverty reduction.

Here, we develop a model which can calculate the change of a household’s savings by using estimated income, expenditure, and flood damage, aiming to quantify the vicious cycle of poverty by flood. By conducting a hydrological simulation, the damage caused by recurrent floods is estimated in terms of the damage of houses and assets, as well as the loss of income. In addition, we consider the improvement in education level and house sturdiness depending on each household’s savings. In other words, we assume that households with higher savings have higher incomes and reduce flood damage in the future because of their adequate education and sturdy houses. On the other hand, the poor remain vulnerable.

Based on the results of this model, we evaluate the effectiveness of flood control measures, such as embarkment and land use regulations, as well as measures from socio-economic aspects, such as educational support. While this process is often done through cost-benefit analysis, we use relative benefits, the sum of the ratio of each household's losses that could be prevented by measures. This makes it possible to take into account the impact of the poor with smaller absolute losses.

Our case study is conducted in Bago city, Myanmar.

This study provides a novel approach to demonstrate the long-term effects over generations of multiple measures. These results could assist a policy making by a local government from a socio-economic perspective for reducing flood damage and eradicating poverty in the long run.