Célian Colon was invited to speak at the Complexity Science Hub

Coupling transport and supply chains to analyze the impact of disasters – an application to the United Republic of Tanzania

The economy of the United Republic of Tanzania is growing fast but remains vulnerable to disasters. Its transport system, which mainly consist of roads, often get disrupted by floods, leading to large economic losses. How could its resilience be improved? We formulate a dynamic agent-based model which combines two approaches: network criticality analyses and economic input–output models. It simulates the impacts of transportation disruption on firms, and how these impacts propagate along supply chains and affect households. We found that losses nonlinearly increase with the duration of the initial disruption. Supply chains amplify disruptions for nonprimary products, such as processed food. Bottlenecks varies with supply chains. Some infrastructures are critical to some agents, say international buyers, but of little use to others. Resilience-enhancing strategies need to articulate supply-side—e.g., improving infrastructure quality—and demand-side measures—e.g., manage the need for transportation. This project was funded by The World Bank.