Using Disaster Surveys to Model Business Interruption

Business interruption after disasters is an important metric for community resilience planning because has both economic and social consequences. Each additional day that a business is nonoperational further compounds lost revenue, wages, and lack of access to goods and services needed for recovery. Therefore, the use of surveys has grown in the literature as a way to capture the diverse information needed for modeling business disaster outcomes. However, variable inclusion and measurement can vary widely across studies, and there is a lack of guidance on how to structure surveys most effectively to facilitate this effort. This study fills these gaps through an analysis of variable choice, variable measurement, and measurement timing using data from an interdisciplinary field study in Lumberton, North Carolina after 2016 Hurricane Matthew. We found that empirical business interruption models can be improved significantly by using a comprehensive set of utility and damage variables; integrating damage information based on damage states for building, contents, and machinery; and capturing recovery-time dynamics by using business downtime and utility outage durations, rather than binary measurements. The results suggest that making these relatively small changes to survey design in future studies can yield large returns in empirical business models for community resilience research

Whether to insure against the weather: demand for extreme weather insurance in developing and developed country contexts

Many households in developing and developed countries will face increased extreme weather events due to climate change. Insurance could be a key coping strategy against the associated impacts of extreme weather. There is value in better understanding the characteristics that make insurance an appropriate means of coping for some sub-groups over others. The framework for household decisions to insure used in this research focuses on four factors: 1. economic, 2. social and cultural, 3. structural, and 4. personal and demographic. This thesis considers two case studies: agricultural index-based microinsurance in rural Uganda and home flood insurance in the USA It seeks to understand intended demand and the related drivers for insurance in these settings through the use of large-N surveys, field games, and on-line simulations. The rural Ugandan survey tool was implemented using innovative smart-phone technology and yielded 3000+ observations of expressed willingness-to-join (WTJ) and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for agricultural microinsurance. This tool also obtained information concerning propensity to engage with alternative coping strategies, both formal and informal. It also obtained household indicators of the factor classesnoted above. A separate field game in Uganda investigated attitudes towards basis risk arising from index insurance using a novel, iterative game involving farmers allocating their wealth between insurance and crop production. The game is played in partner sets to gauge the relative influence of others’ decisions and outcomes on one’s choice to insure. The USA study compares propensity to purchase flood insurance between those affected and unaffected by Hurricane Sandy in the same geographic areas. We obtained 800 observations from an online survey tool, combining survey questions and a flood insurance purchase simulation. In the simulation we include as a treatment a more extensive (graphical) presentation of expected losses to assess the effect oninsurance uptake rates. In the Ugandan case, WTJ is over 95% and the average WTP is moderate relative to household wealth. For our sample there is evidence that microinsurance and loans are substitutes and the most frequently chosen traditional coping strategy is selling cattle. In the American study, respondents insure in just over 50% of the presented simulations and over 60% have a positive stated WTJ. Notably, there is little insurance demand difference between cohorts affected and unaffected by Hurricane Sandy. In both studies, a significant proportion of respondents with disparate personal characteristics chose to always or never insure, regardless of the details of the simulation scenarios, though WTJ varies positively with expected losses; this behaviour may be related to affect from the feeling of insurance. In the Ugandan study, occurrence of basis risk reduces WTJ in the following period and respondents clearly are affected by the choices made by their partners. In the American study, insurance adoption is greater for the cohort exposed to the more extensive (graphical) presentation of expected losses. In both cases we find that of the four factor classes social and cultural as well as structural factors are frequently significant in regression models for intended insurance demand. As weather-related covariate risks increase in the future, households need coping mechanisms that are culturally viable and conform to individuals’ preferences. This thesis demonstrates methods by which to determine intended demand for extreme weather insurance in the developing and developed country contexts. Such information can inform the development of insurance tools consistent with consumer preferences and help identify households that may be the best candidates for use of insurance

Pre-notification letter type and response rate to a postal survey among women who have recently given birth

Background: Surveys are commonly used in health research to assess patient satisfaction with hospital care. Achieving an adequate response rate, in the face of declining trends over time, threatens the quality and reliability of survey results. This paper reports on a postal satisfaction survey conducted with women who had recently given birth, and explores the effect of two strategies on response rates. Methods: A sample of 2048 Australian women who had recently given birth were invited to participate in a postal survey about their recent experiences with maternity care. The study design included two different strategies intended to increase response rates: a randomised controlled trial testing two types of pre-notification letter (with or without the option of opting out of the survey), and a request for consent to link survey data with existing routinely collected health data (omitting the latter data items from the survey reduced survey length and participant burden). Results: The survey had an overall response rate of 46%. Women receiving the pre-notification letter with the option of opting out of the survey were more likely to actively decline to participate than women receiving the letter without this option, although the overall numbers of women were small (27 versus 12). Letter type was not significantly associated with the return of a completed survey. Among women who completed the survey, 97% gave consent to link their survey data with existing health data. Conclusions: Seeking consent for record linkage was highly acceptable to women who completed the survey, and represents an important strategy to add to the arsenal for designing and implementing effective surveys. In addition to aspects of survey design, future research should explore how to more effectively influence personal constructs that contribute to the decision to participate in surveys.NHMR

Resilience Dividends and Resilience Windfalls: Narratives That Tie Disaster Resilience Co-Benefits to Long-Term Sustainability

The need for increased disaster resilience planning, especially at the community level, as well as the need to address sustainability are clear; these dual objectives have been deemed national priorities in a number of recent US Executive Orders. Major global climate agreements, (i.e., the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, Paris Climate Agreement, and the Sustainable Development Goals) all emphasize the need to integrate disaster resilience and climate risks with continued sustainable development concerns. Current ways of assessing synergies and trade-offs across planning for disaster resilience and sustainability in investment projects that impact communities are limited. The driving research question in this paper is how researchers and practitioners may better express relative categories of co-benefits to meet this need. We draw upon the categorization of some co-benefits as contributing to the resilience dividend, which has helped communication across fields and created bridges from research to practical on-the-ground planning in recent years. Furthermore, we leverage the growing focus on the need to recognize the role of narratives in driving decisions about how and where to invest, which elucidates the inherent value of archetypes that resonate across stakeholders and disciplines to describe investments that may meet multiple objectives. We introduce the concept of a resilience windfall as an unexpected or sudden gain or advantage of resilience planning to be conceptualized alongside resilience dividends. We then assess the practicality of discerning resilience windfalls across various projects that have aspects of both resilience and sustainability. We recount five narrative vignettes that demonstrate disaster resilience interventions and associated resilience dividends and windfalls. This effort highlights the importance of considering resilience dividends and resilience windfalls during the planning, execution, and evaluation phases of disaster resilience projects. These typologies provide an important contribution to the integration agenda between disaster resilience, climate risks, and sustainable development. There are policy implications of framing incentives for interventions that address both disaster resilience and long-term sustainability objectives as well as encouraging robust tracking of both resilience dividends and windfalls

Ugandan community knowledge workers: complex games and technology in the field

A group of Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs) test the complex game section of the Muth Helgeson Survey Tool (MHST) in the Oyam, Uganda region. Over 130 CKWs were equipped with smart phones with the MHST application, which also incorporated small behavioural economics games. These CKWs physically visited over 5000 Ugandan farms, measuring farmers behaviours and attitudes regarding risk. The MHST is the largest study of Ugandan farms since 1991 and the first to use this methodology to examine how farmers make investment decisions. Results of the MHST inform the design of new microinsurance tools. Through the use of local people, local social networks, locally-built software, and local languages, Helgeson was able to learn far more than possible with just an economist from London

Ugandan Community Knowledge Worker: using technology in the field

A Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) from the Kapchorwa region tests the pilot for the Muth Helgeson Survey Tool (MHST) in the Grameen Foundation AppLab in Kampala, Uganda. Over 130 CKWs were equipped with smart phones with the MHST application, which also incorporated small behavioural economics games (with dice and coins). These CKWs physically visited over 5000 Ugandan farms, measuring farmers’ behaviours and attitudes regarding risk. The MHST is the largest study of Ugandan farms since 1991 and the first to use this methodology to examine how farmers make crop choices and decisions concerning financial investments. Through the use of local people, local social networks, locally-built software, and local languages, Helgeson was able to learn far more than possible with just an economist from London

Female Ugandan community knowledge workers: using technology in the field

Female Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs) test the pilot for the Muth Helgeson Survey Tool (MHST) in the Kapchorwa, Uganda region. Over 130 CKWs were equipped with smart phones with the MHST application, which also incorporated small behavioural economics games using dice and coins. These CKWs physically visited over 5000 Ugandan farms, measuring farmers behaviours and attitudes regarding risk. The MHST is the largest study of Ugandan farms since 1991 and the first to use this methodology to examine how farmers make investment decisions. Results of the MHST inform the design of new microinsurance tools. Through the use of local people, local social networks, locally-built software, and local languages, Helgeson was able to learn far more than possible with just an economist from London