Knowledge, perception or disaster experience? The new determinants of household disaster preparedness behaviour in Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship among education, knowledge, perception and disaster experience to investigate whether household disaster preparedness behaviour mitigates income losses. We employ instrumental variables approach and generate indigenous knowledge from a large-scale dataset to examine responsiveness of disaster preparedness via unemployment and production. We identify disaster and climate knowledge perception as new determinant towards disaster risk reduction. Our findings suggest Disaster Preparedness Index (DPI) is almost 64% effective in mitigating household per capita net income loss in comparison with the mean via unemployment channel. We argue that informal education and community-based training could bring more efficacies in this loss mitigation mechanism.