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For millennia, people across the globe have reported alarmed animal behaviour in the run-up to natural disasters. Could these signals be used to warn us of impending catastrophes?
Most disasters are caused by earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, or droughts. They affect areas in which three quarters of the world's population live. The impact of hazards is unequally distributed and disproportionately affects the most vulnerable communities.
To do so, we need to understand how disaster events are changing, who is most vulnerable, and what can be done to protect them. On this page, you will find our complete collection of data, charts, and research on natural disasters and their costs.
- Definitions
- Disaster Criteria
- Global Occurrence of Natural Disasters in 2018
- Geophysical Disasters
- Meteorological Hazard
- Hydrological Disasters: Floods
- Climatological Disasters
- Biological Natural Disasters
There are numerous definitions of a disaster. Turner and Pidgeon (1997) pointed out that no definition of ‘disaster’ is universally accepted. Seeking or proposing definitions of disaster can be a complex task and may create considerable frustration and obscurity in scholars (Cutter 2005). However, disasters can be classified into three types: man-m...
The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) launched the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) which is an International Disaster Database in 1988. EM-DAT was created with the initial support of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Belgian government. CRED requires that for a disaster to be entered into the database at least...
In 2018, there were 315 climate-related and geophysical disaster events recorded in the EM-DAT with 11,804 deaths and over 68 million people affected across the world. Figure 2.4 shows the numbers of disasters by continent and top ten countries. Globally, Indonesia recorded nearly half the total deaths from disasters, while India recorded the highe...
Geophysical disasters are destructive events that originate within or are caused by the processes of the solid earth. They include earthquakes, volcanoes and mass movement.
Meteorological hazard is defined as a hazard caused by short-lived, micro- to meso-scale extreme weather and atmospheric conditions that last from minutes to days (IRDR 2014). This hazard category includes various storms such as extratropical storms (winter storm), tropical storms/cyclones and local or convective storms; they are defined as the fol...
Hydrological disasters occur as a result of violent, sharp and harmful changes in the quality of Earth’s water resulting in redistribution of water (OMICS 2019). A flood occurs because of overflow of water beyond its boundaries and impacts human settlements and infrastructure (ibid.). Floods are the most prominent type of hydrological disaster. Eve...
According to Below, Wirtz and Guha-Sapir (2009), climatological disasters include extreme temperatures (which include heatwaves, cold waves and extreme winter conditions), droughts and wildfires. Climatological disasters are defined as events which are caused by long-term meso- to macro-level processes and range from seasonal to multiple time perio...
According to the disaster classification provided by Lucic et al. (2013), biological natural disasters include epidemics and insect infestations. Epidemics occur because of wide-scale viral, bacterial, fungal, parasitic and prion (caused by a protein which can result in brain proteins to unfold abnormally) infectious diseases. The deadliest epidemi...
- David Teh, Tehmina Khan
- 2021
Risk creation is outstripping risk reduction. Disasters, economic loss and the underlying vulnerabilities that drive risk, such as poverty and inequality, are increasing just as ecosystems and biospheres are at risk of collapse.
15 de nov. de 2023 · From floods to wildfires, and tsunamis to volcanic eruptions, early-warning systems can stop natural hazards becoming human disasters. But more joined-up thinking is urgently...
Copernicus data/ESA/Comet 2023/BBC. In truth, the science of predicting earthquakes is very, very difficult. While there are often minute signals that can be detected in the seismic data after an...
