comparing this to European data, the probability could be lowered to 3.4 per million. Applying a DALY of US$ 1,000 and 5,000 respectively, this would lead to an annual benefit of between US$ 700 million and 3.5 billion per year.

- Weather sensitive economic sectors create about 25 percent of world GDP. It is assumed that improved forecasting could lead to added economic benefits between 0.1 and 1 percent in these sectors. This would lead to an increase in GDP of between 0.025 and 0.25 percent if forecasting quality is increased to western/central European standards.

We recalculated the estimations from Hallegatte (2012) of potential benefits of European-standard forecasting for LICs only, using the same assumptions but more current data on population and GDP (World Bank 2014). Unsurprisingly, the results are very similar, listed in Table 3.2.

**_Table 3.2_** _: Potential annual benefits of European-standard forecasting in LICs, measured in 2014 values._

|**Benefit type**|**Potential value of improved**<br>**forecasting in LICs (US$)**|
|---|---|
|Reduced asset losses|12-68 million|
|Reduced human losses|65-327 million|
|Additional economicproductivity|99-993 million|
|TOTAL|176-1,388 million|

Hallegatte (2012) assumes a direct relationship between improved availability of weather and climate information and improved decision-making and action, thereby attributing all potential benefits of preparedness to early warning. While forecasting and resultant early warning are critical to early action, the resultant benefits would in fact not be realized without substantially improving the ability of people and institutions to use forecasts. Therefore this is an optimistic assumption particularly in developing countries, where most, if not all, components of the disaster and climate risk management value chain lack capacity to varying degrees. WMO et al (2015) highlights that assumptions of perfect decisionmaking based on all available information are not realistic, advocating for simultaneous and complementary capacity building for both providers and users of weather and climate information to realize maximum benefits.

# 3.3.2 Attribution to global NWP

As providing global forecasting products alone is in most LICs not sufficient to improve forecasting quality to western European standards, the attributable benefits would only be a certain percentage of the total potential benefits estimated by Hallegatte (2012). However, defining this percentage is a difficult task and – to the authors’ knowledge – there are no publications that have determined such a percentage.

Using historical data on forecasting quality trends, combined with expert assessments, an attempt is made to estimate the percentage of potential LIC forecasting improvement due to global NWP. It must however be noted that forecasting is the value provided by the interpretation of guidance, including NWP, along with other expert knowledge and information. If the local forecasts are good, they will benefit greatly from improved guidance, in this case global NWP outputs. If local forecast capacity is limited, improved access to global NWP may not add any significant value. The analysis therefore 14