Disaster resilience and causal linkages between natural disasters and human behavior: A longitudinal case study with victims of typhoon Yolanda in Panay, Philippines

This thesis investigates channels to improve individual/household disaster resilience and the causal relation between disaster exposure and changes in capital endowment, social preferences and risk preferences. We use longitudinal data of Philippine coastal villagers from the island Panay which consists of two waves of observation. The first wave was conducted one year before, the second wave three years after one of the most devastating typhoons which ever occurred since meteorological recordings: typhoon Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda). Our data-set includes observations of 1156 individuals, whereat 449 of which are represented in both waves of observation and about half of our observed part of the population was strongly affected by the typhoon, while the other half was rather mildly affected, or not affected at all. We conducted a variety of methods in both years, including incentivized experimental games such as the solidarity game and risk tasks, as well as key informant interviews and focus group discussions including participatory rural appraisal tools in the second wave of observation. We use the collected data to identify channels which contributed most to an effective disaster recovery process, as well as causal relations between disaster exposure and development of human, social, and financial capital and development in risk- and social preferences. The results of this thesis show that investments in households financial capital may be most promising to foster faster disaster recovery compared to other forms of capital, such as social and human capital. We find no causal relation between disaster exposure and behavior in incentivized risk- and social preference tasks, contrary to studies which mostly have only cross sectional data at hand. Therefore this study makes important implications for decision makers involved in disaster risk reduction, by providing further understanding of what possible key determinants of households disaster resilience are, and how capital endowment and aspects of human behavior change over time as a consequence to a typhoon. The results of this study are furthermore highly relevant for the Philippine population, since reports from the latest IPCC imply that the nation may have to face increasing numbers in severe typhoons in the future