Natural hazards cost the world 90 million jobs every year
When we think about disasters, we often picture damaged buildings, flooded streets, or destroyed infrastructure. What is less visible, but just as devastating, is what happens to people’s jobs and livelihoods.
Our new global study covering 132 countries, Worldwide Job Losses Due to Natural Hazards, puts a number on these hidden costs. It finds that each year, disasters and extreme heat are associated with the loss of around 90 million full‑time job equivalents worldwide.
Every job lost or disrupted represents a worker losing income, a family struggling to make ends meet, a small business under strain and communities facing setbacks that can take years to overcome.
Natural hazards undermine jobs and productivity
The study finds that rapid‑onset disasters such as floods, earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis account for about 9.4 million job losses each year on average. Earthquakes and floods are the largest drivers, reflecting both their frequency and the scale of economic disruption they cause.
When extreme disasters occur, their job impacts far exceed average annual losses. Besides affecting incomes and jobs, disasters also destroy assets and constrain consumption, which means that job losses are just one part of the overall economic toll of disasters.
But the biggest impact on jobs comes from a slower, more pervasive hazard: extreme heat. Heat exposure accounts for nearly 80 million job losses each year, as high temperatures reduce how long and how safely people can work, especially in physically demanding outdoor occupations like agriculture and construction. Unlike disasters, heat directly affects labor productivity, so job losses represent a large share of the economic impact of heat.
For workers, these job “equivalent” losses do not necessarily mean unemployment. Instead, they mean fewer hours, lower productivity, lost income, or a slide into more precarious work. Informal workers, who make up a large share of employment in developing countries, are often the first to feel the shock and the last to recover.
The poorest workers are hit the hardest
The burden of disaster‑related job losses is highly unequal. Our study shows that low‑income countries experience job loss rates more than twice as high as in upper‑middle‑income countries and six times higher than in high‑income countries.
Within countries, the pattern is just as stark. The study shows that the poorest population groups bear a disproportionate share of job losses. In Türkiye, for example, 41 percent of disaster‑induced job losses fall on the poorest fifth of the population.
This reflects how disasters interact with existing vulnerabilities. Poorer households are more likely to work in climate‑sensitive sectors, rely on physical labor, and lack savings or insurance. When disasters hit, they have fewer buffers and face greater difficulty rebuilding their livelihoods. For many, a temporary shock can turn into long‑term poverty.
Related video: Extreme heat is stealing 300 million jobs every year
🔥 Extreme heat is quietly reshaping the global economy. Every year, the equivalent of 300+ million full-time jobs are lost — not to layoffs, but because work has simply become too hot to do.
Investing in resilience protects jobs and livelihoods
The scale of disaster‑related job losses highlighted by this study underscores why effective risk management is central to protecting jobs and livelihoods. For the World Bank Group, this means embedding resilience into investments, policy reforms, and urban development strategies — not just to reduce disaster damage, but also to contribute to a positive agenda of productivity, economic development and job creation. We take a three-pillar approach:
- Building foundational infrastructure is the first line of defense. World Bank Group investments in resilient roads, flood protection, energy systems, and water infrastructure help keep firms operational and workers employed when hazards strike. Human infrastructure matters just as much: health, education, skilling, and social protection systems determine how quickly workers and communities can recover. In Bangladesh, for example, a World Bank-supported program combined flood protection repairs with livelihood support, helping households and local economies bounce back faster from the 2024 floods.
- Strengthening governance and the regulatory environment determines how well countries can prepare for and respond to shocks. The World Bank Group works with governments to embed disaster preparedness into national policy systems, including early warning systems, emergency response capacity, and prearranged financing instruments. As a result, more than 65 countries now use elements of the World Bank's Crisis Preparedness and Response Toolkit. In Rwanda, for example, a 2025 Disaster Risk Management Development Policy Financing operation is improving risk information and institutional coordination to protect jobs and economic activity against growing climate-related hazards.
- Mobilizing private capital is essential to closing the financing gap. IFC and MIGA support resilient infrastructure and essential services through investment, guarantees, and political risk insurance, helping crowd in private investors where public resources alone fall short. In Türkiye, MIGA-backed hospitals near the epicenter of the February 2023 earthquakes withstood the disaster and kept operating, demonstrating how well-structured private capital can sustain essential services — and the workers who depend on them — through major shocks.
Taken together, these interventions show why risk‑informed development is essential for protecting jobs. By integrating disaster risk management into urban infrastructure projects, policy financing, and country‑level strategies, the World Bank Group supports countries reduce the 90 million jobs lost to natural hazards each year and contributes to more resilient and competitive economies.