This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| EM-DAT | |
|---|---|
| Name | EM-DAT |
| Established | 1988 |
| Managed by | Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters |
| Location | Liege |
| Discipline | Disaster studies |
| Languages | English, French |
EM-DAT EM-DAT is an international disaster database that compiles quantitative information on natural disaster events, technological incidents, and complex emergencies. It supports disaster risk reduction, humanitarian response, and academic research by providing standardized records of fatalities, affected populations, and economic losses. Users from United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, World Health Organization, World Bank, and nongovernmental organizations consult the dataset for policy-making, program evaluation, and historical analysis.
EM-DAT provides time-series and event-level data on floods, earthquakes, cyclones, droughts, epidemics, volcanic eruptions, landslides, wildfires, industrial accidents, and armed-conflict–related disasters. The database includes metadata on geographic location, temporal span, human impact, and economic damages that enables comparative studies across regions such as Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Caribbean, and Europe. Major users include researchers affiliated with Harvard University, London School of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and policy teams within European Commission and Asian Development Bank.
EM-DAT was initiated in 1988 by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium to address needs expressed at international fora such as World Conference on Disaster Reduction and Hyogo Framework for Action. Early dataset assembly drew on archival reports from agencies including International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, United Nations Children's Fund, Food and Agriculture Organization, and national disaster offices like Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Disaster Management Authority (India), and Japan Meteorological Agency. Over successive decades, EM-DAT evolved in response to methodological debates reflected in literature from institutions such as United Nations University, International Monetary Fund, and academic journals like The Lancet and Nature Climate Change.
Data acquisition integrates sources such as international agency reports, peer-reviewed studies, national statistical offices, and media outlets like Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and The New York Times. Events are entered when they meet predefined thresholds for deaths, affected persons, or declared states of emergency similar to criteria discussed by experts from Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Methodological guidance has been informed by collaborations with researchers at World Health Organization, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and Oxford University while aligning terminology with initiatives like Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
EM-DAT classifies disasters into hazard types such as hydro-meteorological, geological, biological, and technological, paralleling categorizations used by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and United Nations Environment Programme. For each event the database records dates, administrative units comparable to United States Census Bureau geocode levels, estimates of deaths, injured, homeless, and affected, plus direct economic damage figures. Notable historical events represented include the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, 2010 Haiti earthquake, 2005 Hurricane Katrina, and 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, enabling cross-event comparisons used by analysts at International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and research centers such as PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
EM-DAT is accessed by policymakers at United Nations Development Programme, humanitarian planners at Médecins Sans Frontières, climate scientists at National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and economists at Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Applications include trend analysis in peer-reviewed studies from University of Oxford, risk modeling for insurers like Munich Re and Swiss Reinsurance Company, and scenario planning used by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiators. Educational programs at institutions such as Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley incorporate EM-DAT outputs into curricula on disaster risk management.
Scholars from Princeton University, University of Cambridge, and Yale University have highlighted biases arising from underreporting in low-income contexts, inconsistencies between national and international tallies, and challenges in monetizing damages across markets with differing price levels. Critiques also note temporal inconsistencies during historical periods covered unevenly in archives like British Library or national repositories including National Archives (United States), and reliance on media sources that can introduce selection bias as documented by researchers at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review.
EM-DAT is maintained by CRED at Université catholique de Louvain with governance input from partners including World Health Organization, Belgian Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs, and donor agencies such as European Commission humanitarian aid department and multilateral funders like World Bank. Project funding has come from grants and institutional support from entities including United States Agency for International Development, Department for International Development (United Kingdom), and philanthropic foundations similar to Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Category:Disaster databases