Social Accounting for Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Planning

Keywords: Natural Disasters, Community Recovery, Subcultures, Social Accounting Matrices, Long Term Recovery, Special Populations, Culture, Loss Estimation Methodology, Economic Damage, and Poverty.

Abstract: This report describes the first two phases of a project to develop a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) modeling system as a tool for assessing the economic damage arising from natural disasters and for helping to devise recovery strategies. The resulting system may be used to design proactive strategies for regions known to be vulnerable to specific natural disasters (such as earthquakes and hurricanes), as well as to assess damage and aid recovery in localities which have suffered an unanticipated disaster. This report describes the methods used to construct and test the SAM, based on work in a small Caribbean island. This study shows that a suitable SAM model which takes account of the destructive effects of a disaster can be constructed rather rapidly, and that this model can reproduce the events of an economic disaster and recovery for employment and income over an extended period. Special attention has been paid to the lifeline sectors. More detailed versions of the model to account for the differential impacts across social groups by occupation, education, geography and demography among the affected regions population are also described.