Advanced Materials Science Research

Top Journals In Natural Disasters

If we look at the average over the past decade, around 60,000 people worldwide died each year from natural disasters. This represents 0.1 per cent of deaths worldwide. In the visualizations shown here we see the annual variability in the number and share of natural disaster deaths over the last decades. What we see is that deaths can be very low in many years – often less than 10,000, and represent as low as 0.01 per cent of total deaths. Natural disasters provide striking observations on the role vulnerability plays in explaining loss patterns among peoples and regions. Hazards become disasters when the capacity of a population or place to adapt or cope is overwhelmed by a disturbance. Elderly people and children are more sensitive to disasters due to physical and physiological limitations affecting their ability to cope with rapid environmental change and comply with evacuation procedures, and lower cognitive ability to process information about hazards. Although considerable progress has been made in mapping and understanding vulnerability to natural disasters, no predictive disaster risk models are available. A lack of available subnational data and a lack of consideration of multiple multiscalar hazards are the two main reasons for this.

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