Thirteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

We quantify the global spending burden of humanitarian disaster response. While international response flows are well-documented, global domestic spending on disasters is virtually unknown. We employ log-log fixed-effects models to estimate international humanitarian disaster response spending as recorded by UNOCHA’s Financial Tracking Service (FTS) by recipient country and year, as a function of government capacity. Conservatively assuming all humanitarian disaster response spending in the lowest-capacity countries originates from without, we calculate a Population Attributable Fraction for the proportion of total spending attributable to capacity, reverse-calculating yearly estimates of total humanitarian disaster response spending. We find actual expenditures to be roughly 20 times as high as official FTS figures, or around $560 billion. Finally, we use Simultaneous Equation Models to examine how total humanitarian disaster response spending is influenced by climate change (proxied by NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature data). We find each 1 degree C rise in 5-year temperature anomalies would require a 193.8% (95% CI: 74.2% – 313.3%) rise in spending on coping capacity and a 273.7% (95% CI: 195.3% – 352.2%) rise in spending on disaster hazard reduction to meet the same proportion of need as it presently does. In total, we estimate a further 1 degree C rise in global temperatures would require total annual humanitarian expenditures of $2.84 trillion, or about 2% of worldwide 2019 GDP, in order to maintain current levels of humanitarian needs coverage. Of the three major predictors of disaster-related spending, coping capacity is reliably most significant, meriting coequal funding consideration with disaster response.