Ole Lueck (p), Javier Revila Diez

Andreas Bühler

Climate change increasingly threatens livelihoods and economic stability in low- and middle-income countries through more frequent and severe natural disasters. These climate shocks disproportionately disrupt rural micro firms and the related entrepreneurial households, severely affecting income, employment, and overall household resilience. Despite this growing threat, the relationship between climate-induced shocks and the resilience of entrepreneurial households operating micro-enterprises in rural areas of the Global South remains underexplored. In particular, little is known about how ex-ante preparedness strategies — such as financial savings, income diversification, and risk awareness — influence the resilience and adaptive capacity of micro-businesses and their corresponding households. This study addresses this knowledge gap by examining how such preparedness measures enable households to sustain their micro-enterprises and maintain overall household resilience following climate shocks, focusing on two middle-income countries that are highly affected by Climate Change.

Leveraging detailed longitudinal household and firm data from the Thailand Vietnam Socio-Economic Panel (TVSEP) from 2007 to 2022, combined with high-resolution, spatially explicit climate data, this paper investigates how ex-ante preparedness influences firm survival, house-hold resource allocation, and overall resilience after climate shocks in Thailand and Vietnam. We capture drought shocks at the village level using the Standardized Precipitation Evapotran-spiration Index (SPEI), derived from satellite-based data, and storm exposure through geocoded typhoon track data. Employing a panel fixed-effects regression analysis, the study quantifies the causal effects of disaster exposure and ex-ante preparedness on firm continuity and household economic resilience, emphasizing dynamic changes and resource shifts.

We expect that our findings will reveal how ex-ante preparedness strategies moderate the impacts of climate shocks, providing empirical evidence for effective household coping mechanisms. By integrating firm- and household-level perspectives, this study aims to contribute theoretically to resilience frameworks and entrepreneurial preparedness literature, specifically in rural and micro-enterprise contexts in the Global South. Ultimately, the insights derived will have significant policy implications, informing targeted interventions aimed at enhancing micro-enterprise preparedness and household resilience to climate-related disruptions.

Andreas Bühler (p), Patrick Lehnert, Harald Pfeifer

Hiroyuki Shibusawa

Understanding adolescents’ aspirations for green occupations (i.e., occupations that contains skills that contribute to the green energy transformation) is important for ensuring an adequately skilled workforce to mitigate climate change. Therefore, we examine how exposure to natural disasters influences adolescents' aspirations for green occupations through increased environmental awareness. We argue that individuals who experience natural disasters are more likely to behave pro-environmentally and thus to aspire for green occupations. Combining individual-level data on occupational aspirations, job content data to measure the greenness of occupations and administrative data on disaster events, we find that young adults who were exposed to a natural disaster aspire to occupations with a higher share of green job contents. This relationship holds when we control for individual background and individuals’ cognitive abilities through, math and science test scores. We also find that such exposure is related to environmental awareness, suggesting that environmental awareness acts as one channel through which natural disasters shape occupational aspirations. Additionally, we run a placebo test with disasters that are not related to climate change and show that these disasters are not related to the greenness score.

Hiroyuki Shibusawa (p), Mingji Cui

Ole Lueck

In recent years, natural disasters in Japan have become more frequent and larger in scale, with greater economic impacts and longer recovery periods. Assessing these impacts on regional industrial economies is challenging, especially when predicting future disaster risks. Simulation techniques are essential to assess such risks.

In this study, we develop an industrial economic recovery simulator for natural disasters based on dynamic modeling of interregional input-output tables (IOs). This simulator aims to evaluate the economic impacts of disasters and the recovery process. In addition, this study considers using the simulator to create teaching materials that help teach disaster preparedness and resilience. Input-output analysis is an important method for evaluating policies, and dynamic models are increasingly recognized as effective tools for evaluating the impacts of future policies. By applying this model to education, this study also aims to raise disaster prevention awareness.

In Japan, national and regional input-output tables are compiled by the government. This study estimates interregional input-output tables (IRIOs) and multiregional input-output tables (MRIOs) for Japan's prefectures. By incorporating IRIO and MRIO tables into a dynamic spatial input-output table, this simulator provides a framework that can be applied to the analysis of various disasters.
This study develops teaching materials for estimating direct damage rates from hazard map information for natural disasters. The simulator can evaluate the impact of various types of disasters and recovery processes. The simulator measures spatial spillover effects at the regional level, helping to understand and evaluate how disaster impacts spread across regions. In addition, we also consider how to visualize the simulation results, making the data more accessible and intuitive for users.
As Japan is highly vulnerable to natural disasters, evaluating disaster resilience, including economic damage and recovery processes, is an important policy issue. This study also considers the possibility of introducing the developed simulator into educational settings to enhance disaster preparedness. Through these efforts, this study investigates the effective use of the simulator and data, as well as challenges that may arise in future applications.