Ecological economics of coastal disasters: Introduction to the special issue

Coastal disasters are increasing in frequency and magnitude-measured in terms of human lives lost, destroyed infrastructure, ecological damage and disrupted social networks. Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami illustrate the severe and widespread impacts of such disasters on human well-being. The proximate cause of most of these disasters is “forces of nature”. However, human decisions, driven largely by economic forces, do much to aggravate these natural disasters-for example, coastal mangroves and wetlands protect coastal communities from wave surges and winds, but are rapidly being converted for the production of market goods, and anthropogenic climate change driven by the energy use of our economy may exacerbate coastal disasters in several ways. The goal of economics should be to improve the sustainable well-being of humans. Our well-being is generated in part by the production of market goods and services, but also by the goods and services provided by nature, by social networks and norms, by knowledge and health-in short: built, natural, social and human capital, respectively. In seeking to increase human well-being solely by maximizing the monetary value of market goods (built capital), our current economic system may be doing more to undermine our sustainable well-being than to improve it, a point made clear by the growing negative impacts of coastal disasters. An economic system should allocate available resources in a way that equitably and efficiently provides for the sustainable well-being of people by protecting and investing in all four types of capital. This is what ecological economics seeks to do. This article introduces ten papers that apply the four capital framework to the analysis of coastal disasters, seeking to understand their impacts and how to mitigate them, how to predict and plan for them, and how to use this information to redesign coastal areas in a more sustainable and desirable way.