Dynamic Assessment of Impacts

The MERIT (Measuring the Economics of Resilient Infrastructure) decision support tool was developed to help resilience planners estimate the economic consequences of disruptive events. We are improving MERIT to capture more impacts of natural hazard events and provide insights into the changing nature of these impacts. Our research is organised into three sub-projects:

• Dynamic value change analysis: applying MERIT’s Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) to understand economic value chains in greater detail, so planners can use this information to identify and mitigate pinch points in the economy that could delay response, recovery and rebuild.
• Welfare impacts by household type: extending MERIT capabilities to cover ‘welfare’ impacts to enable decision-makers and planners to target resilience measures to the most vulnerable communities.
• Dynamic assessment of multiple capitals: extending MERIT to provide decision-makers with assessments of the physical and financial impacts of natural hazards as well as social and environmental impacts.

Our goal is for MERIT to provide resilience decision-makers with a robust decision support system that gives them a broad and detailed understanding of the changing financial, social and environmental impacts of natural hazards.