A new study published in Big Earth Data introduces Geo-Disasters, a new database designed to improve the usability of global disaster records for climate risk research and policy planning.
Citation
Teber, K., Weynants, M., Gans, F., & Mahecha, M. D. (2025). Geo-Disasters: Geocoding climate-related events in the international disaster database EM-DAT. Big Earth Data, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/20964471.2025.2576274
Abstract
Climate hazards can escalate into humanitarian disasters. Understanding their trajectories—considering hazard intensity, human exposure, and societal vulnerability—is essential for effective anticipatory action. The International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) is the only freely available global resource of humanitarian disaster records. However, it has imprecise geocoded information, which severely constrains its integration with spatial climate and socioeconomic data, limiting its use for climate impact research and policy planning. Here, we present Geo-Disasters (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15487667), a database that provides geocoded locations of 9,217 climate-related disasters reported by EM-DAT from 1990 to 2023, along with an open, reproducible framework for updating (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29125907.v1). Our method remains accurate even when only region names are available and includes matching quality flags to assess reliability. The augmented EM-DAT enables integration with other geocoded data, supporting machine learning applications and cross-domain analyses of climate risks, vulnerabilities, and adaptation deficits. By making more extreme events available, Geo-Disasters aims to bridge critical data gaps in global climate-hazard risk assessment and to inform more equitable adaptation planning.
#EM-DAT #disaster impacts #geocoding #climate extremes
Big Earth Data is an interdisciplinary Open Access journal which aims to provide an efficient and high-quality platform for promoting the sharing, processing and analyses of Earth-related big data, thereby revolutionizing the cognition of the Earth’s systems. The journal publishes a wide range of content, including Research Articles, Review Articles, Data Notes, Technical Notes, and Perspectives. It is now included in ESCI (IF=3.8, Q1), Scopus (CiteScore=9.0, Q1), Ei Compendex, GEOBASE, and Inspec. Starting from 2023, Big Earth Data has announced a new award series for authors: Best and Outstanding Paper Awards.
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