Systematic literature review of methodologies for assessing the costs of disasters

The importance of this study lies with the significant number of disasters reported over the past decades, the financial volume traded, and due the associated damages and losses. Despite its importance, finding an economic cost assessment methodology to address disasters of small and large proportions as well as to cover all disaster cost types is a challenge. This study, through a systematic literature review (SLR), offers a taxonomy, a framework and a research agenda for assessing the economic costs of disasters. To meet these goals, 1446 peer-reviewed papers and 2825 grey documents were retrieved and analyzed. The results highlight (i) the use of new technologies (such as social media and crowdsourcing) and pre-defined economic costs indicators for improving the disaster assessment response time; (ii) that there is a lack of usage of economic methods (e.g., econometrics, input-output) within the existing methodologies; (iii) and that there are few publications addressing the economic costs of slow-onset disasters. Also, the proposed framework aims to unify, through a critical analysis of the selected documents, common patterns, best practices, functionalities and actions to obtain an economic assessment independent of type and size of the disaster to be assessed. Finally, this study shows the importance of including grey literature in systematic reviews, as 50% of the selected disaster assessment methodologies came from this source.