Impact of future tsunamis from the Java trench on household welfare: Merging geophysics and economics through catastrophe modelling

Abstract

This paper presents the first end-to-end example of a risk model for loss of assets in households due to possible future tsunamis. There is a significant need for Government to assess the generic risk to buildings, and the concrete impact on the full range of assets of households, including the ones that are key to livelihoods such as agricultural land, fishing boats, livestock and equipment. Our approach relies on the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework to integrate hazard and risk. We first generate 25 representative events of tsunamigenic earthquakes off the Southern coast of Java, Indonesia. We then create a new vulnerability function based upon the Indonesian household survey STAR1 of how much assets have been reduced in each household after the 2004 tsunami. We run a multinomial logit regression to precisely allocate the probabilistic impacts to bins that correspond with levels of financial reduction in assets. We focus on the town of Cilacap for which we build loss exceedance curves, which represent the financial losses that may be exceeded at a range of future timelines, using future tsunami inundations over a surveyed layout and value of assets over the city. Our loss calculations show that losses increase sharply, especially for events with return periods beyond 250 years. These series of computations will allow more accurate investigations of impacts on livelihoods and thus will help design mitigation strategies as well as policies to minimize suffering from tsunamis.