The impact of natural disasters in Indonesia: How does welfare accentuate and attenuate the loss of people?

Abstract

The increasing number of disasters in Indonesia exerts significant economic loss and human casualties, whereas Indonesia has focused on disaster risk reduction. Recent studies are lacking to explore how economic growth influences the impact of disasters. This paper aims to seek a deeper understanding of how welfare that represented by the human development index influences the impact of disaster on the people. We implement the concept of welfare and risk reduction as an approach to analyze disaster and welfare data with a focus on flood events in 2008-2018. We obtained the data from BNPB and Statistics Indonesia. We fitted a multivariable negative binomial regression with 'human losses from deaths' as the outcome and provincial Human Development Index (HDI) and provincial gross domestic product (GDP). The results suggest that Provincial HDI is negatively significant associated with human losses from deaths. However, GDP was also found to be positively significant associated, albeit less strongly, with human losses from deaths. These associations bring about potentially significant policy implications.