Rapid economic growth, along with complex urban planning and development processes, tend to accelerate economic vulnerabilities – which makes disaster risk reduction (DRR) interventions more important than ever. In this context, knowing the potential damage and losses due to natural disasters is indispensable to designing pre-disaster mitigation and post-disaster recovery activities. In practice, civil engineers and hazard modellers assess the potential damage of physical assets using a spatial platform. Economists are inclined to estimate losses in economic flows due to natural disasters mainly at state or national levels using econometric methodologies.

 Such divergence in approaches make the DRR field very challenging for economic applications when the expectation is to provide a spatially enabled, decision-support tool that can visualise not only damage to physical assets but also map the overall economic effects of natural disasters. This paper bridges the gap between hazard and economic modellers by devising a spatial platform that can provide inputs to an economic model as well as display the outputs of it on maps. Precisely, this paper contributes to providing a method that unleashes opportunity for hazard and economic scientists to work together to enable better prediction about potential effects of natural disasters.

 Another important contribution of this paper is that it maps the overall effects of natural disasters by economic sectors. It has an utmost importance, especially to the economic policymakers in that they can prioritise budget allocation across the economic sectors as well as geographical areas in terms of their relative disaster risks. Moreover, the proposed method in this paper can support identifying appropriate public policy and development programs to avoid undesirable effects in economic performance and public wellbeing due to catastrophic events.