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This study develops a reconstructed typhoon disaster database over a longer period 1980–2018 and at higher spatial resolution by using the county-level resolution disaster records for the eight coastal provinces of China during the shorter period 2004–2013. Typhoon precipitation and wind data over the shorter period are matched to disaster data and a functional relationship is derived between typhoon meteorological impact and typhoon disaster (direct economic loss). This relationship is used to construct a disaster data set for a longer period. The basic characteristics of the reconstructed database are documented and analyzed. The above analyses show that, firstly, the reconstructed disaster data are consistent with the recorded data due to the highly significant correlation. Secondly, an appropriate reconstruction method is developed, involving three main phases: disaster data expansion for individual stations, establishment of relationships between disaster and typhoon precipitation and wind, and disaster database reconstruction. Thirdly, the annual cumulative damage shows an insignificant downward trend over time. Typhoon damage mainly occurred between July and September each year. Landfalling typhoons that moved northwestward and then turned northward always caused more severe damage in China. In general, the reconstructed disaster database can provides a data basis to typhoon risk and disaster mechanism researches.

Railway structures are endangered by natural hazards. A better understanding of historical railway disaster events and the exposure of railway infrastructures to natural hazards will facilitate railway planning and disaster risk management. This article compiles internet news to build the first database of Chinese railway disasters from 2000 to 2016. Based on the database, the temporal and spatial characteristics of main railway natural disasters and their driving factors are analyzed. By exploring the relationship between the railway disaster and hazard intensity, railway hazard susceptibility maps were generated. The results reveal that 34.35%, 1.91%, 18.22% and 7.18% of railway lines are exposed to very high hazard susceptibility values related to rainfall, gale, earthquake and tropical cyclone, respectively. A multihazard map was further developed based on the single-hazard maps, and we found that 15.10% of railway lines are exposed to very high multihazard susceptibility values. This is the first study to quantify the exposure of China’s railway to multiple natural hazards. The methodology and results provided in this study have profound significance for the disaster risk management of the Chinese railway system and provide useful experience for other countries.

Global disaster databases are prone to missing data. Neglect or inappropriate handling of missing data can bias statistical analyses. Consequently, this risks the reliability of study results and the wider evidence base underlying climate and disaster policies. In this paper, a comprehensive systematic literature review was conducted to determine how missing data have been acknowledged and handled in disaster research. We sought empirical, quantitative studies that utilised the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) as a primary or secondary data source to capture an extensive sample of the disaster literature. Data on the acknowledgement and handling of missing data were extracted from all eligible studies. Descriptive statistics and univariate correlation analysis were used to identify trends in the consideration of missing data given specific study characteristics. Of the 433 eligible studies, 44.6% acknowledged missing data, albeit briefly, and 33.5% attempted to handle missing data. Studies having a higher page count were significantly (p < 0.01) less prone to acknowledge or handle missing data, whereas the research field of the publication journal distinguished between papers that simply acknowledged missing data, with those that both acknowledged and handled missing data (p < 0.100). A variety of methods to handle missing data (n = 24) were identified. However, these were commonly ad-hoc with little statistical basis. The broad method used to handle missing data: imputation, augmentation or deletion was significantly (p < 0.001) correlated with the geographical scope of the study. This systematic review reveals large failings of the disaster literature to adequately acknowledge and handle missing data. Given these findings, more insight is required to guide a standard practice of handling missing data in disaster research.

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Objective: Disaster impact databases are important resources for informing research, policy, and decision making. Therefore, understanding the underpinning methodology of data collection used by the databases, how they differ, and quality indicators of the data recorded is essential in ensuring that their use as reference points is valid.Methods: The Australian Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub (AIDRKH) is an open-source platform supported by government to inform disaster management practice. A comparative descriptive review of the Disaster Mapper (hosted at AIDRKH) and the international Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) was undertaken to identify differences in how Australian disasters are captured and measured.Results: The results show substantial variation in identification and classification of disasters across hazard impacts and hazard types and a lack of data structure for the systematic reporting of contextual and impact variables.Conclusions: These differences may have implications for reporting, academic analysis, and thus knowledge management informing disaster prevention and response policy or plans. Consistency in reporting methods based on international classification standards is recommended to improve the validity and usefulness of this Australian database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure elements in open-access disaster databases that are relevant to critical infrastructure and basic services in the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) were transformed into spatial data, to investigate the impact of flash flood hazards in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In this era of big data and hyper-connectivity, the availability of open-access data on exposure elements across scales and systems is largely unknown. Information on exposure elements and hazard susceptibility provide important insights to enhance community resilience, to move away from merely managing disasters to managing the risk of disasters, in line with the SFDRR. The case study of Kuala Lumpur enabled an assessment of information availability in existing disaster databases and within the national system, to facilitate informed decision-making. Findings reveal that there are a total of 26 databases on the internet that provide information on disasters and related elements; of which 18 are global, three are regional and four provide information at the national scale. However, only ten databases are open access where the user is able to easily retrieve information while others provide a “view only option”. The coverage of exposure elements in disaster databases is very poor where only five databases carried such information; and it is not useful for local scale application. Thus, information was sought from multiple open data sources within the national system and transformed into spatial data, to develop an exposure element data inventory for the city. There are 509 exposure elements within Kuala Lumpur, covering 33 private and government hospitals and community clinics; 189 public and private schools and institutions higher education; 261 facilities that provide basic services; and 26 features that represent of social and economic aspects. The exposure elements, which is coherent with the SFDRR, benefits decision-making when overlain with existing flood hazard zones and susceptible areas. Moving forward, emerging hazards due to climate change will be evaluated to strengthen informed decision-making and build community resilience in the city. The empowerment of local level research has great potential to advance open sharing of information on disaster and climate risks in the region.

Railway structures are endangered by natural hazards. A better understanding of historical railway disaster events and the exposure of railway infrastructures to natural hazards will facilitate railway planning and disaster risk management. This article compiles internet news to build the first database of Chinese railway disasters from 2000 to 2016. Based on the database, the temporal and spatial characteristics of main railway natural disasters and their driving factors are analyzed. By exploring the relationship between the railway disaster and hazard intensity, railway hazard susceptibility maps were generated. The results reveal that 34.35%, 1.91%, 18.22% and 7.18% of railway lines are exposed to very high hazard susceptibility values related to rainfall, gale, earthquake and tropical cyclone, respectively. A multihazard map was further developed based on the single-hazard maps, and we found that 15.10% of railway lines are exposed to very high multihazard susceptibility values. This is the first study to quantify the exposure of China's railway to multiple natural hazards. The methodology and results provided in this study have profound significance for the disaster risk management of the Chinese railway system and provide useful experience for other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • 130 hydro-geomorphologic Disaster events occurred in Portugal were characterized. • The main trigger for the hydro-meteorological disasters is the atmospheric forcing. • Previous rainfall conditions and weather patterns of all events were assessed. • Data about the presence or absence of atmospheric rivers for all Disaster events is included. • Disaster cases are mainly associated with SW and W weather types in their genesis. Abstract The DISASTER database records 1969 unique hydro-geomorphologic cases (floods and landslides) that generated human damages in Portugal during a 150 year-period (1865–2015. The main purposes of this work are the following: to present a national disaster events catalogue; to analyse the atmospheric conditions and to discuss the role of rainfall as main driving force of the hydro-geomorphological disaster events. The main Circulation Weather Types (CWTs) and the presence of Atmospheric Rivers (ARs) of each day of the disaster events were classified using the 20CR dataset (1865–2014) and the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (2015). These datasets were used to compute the daily cumulative precipitation and the long term climatological year accumulated precipitation 10th, 50th, 90th and 95th percentile spanning 1865–2015 and the accumulated rainfall conditions after and before each disaster event. In the central and northern Portugal Disaster events are mainly driven by southwest (SW), west (W), northwest (NW) and Cyclonic (C) Weather Types, whereas the CWTs with a southern and eastern component [east (E), southeast (SE) and south (S)] are the main drivers in the south part of the country. Cyclonic CWT is widely associated with convective systems that can generate flash floods and urban floods often responsible for fatalities and injured people. CWTs with a westerly component can be associated to prolonged wet periods that can induce flood events in the main rivers and landslides in the mountain areas. The methodology used to build this disaster event catalogue can be applicable to other study areas, namely the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean regions, where the flood and landslides extremes are related to the atmospheric circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional disaster data are important for understanding the characteristics of disasters and for identifying potential mitigation measures. However, many countries have no official disaster database that includes information such as numbers of deaths or damaged buildings for each disaster event. The Global Centre for Disaster Statistics (GCDS) was established to assist countries and organizations in the collection of disaster data. At present, a significant amount of tsunami disaster data are available from Indonesia, which will be used to demonstrate its application for analyzing vulnerability characteristics of historical tsunamis. There are 53 data points covering 13 tsunami events between the year 1861 and 2014. Based on data availability, five tsunami events, namely the 1977 Sumba, the 2004 Indian Ocean, the 2006 Java, the 2010 Mentawai, and the 2011 Great East Japan, were selected. Numbers of deaths and damaged buildings were used in combination with hazard data to estimate vulnerability, defined as the ratio between maximum flow depth against death and building damage ratios. Numbers of evacuees were initially used to estimate actual numbers of exposed population but it was later discovered that this parameter overestimated the exposed population in certain cases. As a result, this study presents the vulnerability characteristics of people and buildings in Indonesia, exposed to unusual or extreme tsunamis, mostly in a condition without or with limited access to official warnings. In brief, a maximum flow depth of 5 m caused an approximate 100% death ratio in the majority of Indonesian tsunamis in this study. On the other hand, death ratio in the 2011 Japan tsunami was limited to 10% because of the early warning and high disaster awareness. Effective disaster risk reduction activities such as official warnings, evacuations, and tsunami education were observed for certain locations. Lastly, adding hazard and population data at the village level is recommended for improving the collection of future tsunami disaster data for the GCDS database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, both human and material damages caused by different types of flooding in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) were determined for the first time. Human damages (fatalities, evacuated and displaced people) were obtained from the DISASTER database (1865–2010 period). Material damages’ estimation was obtained from the Portuguese Association of Insurers database for the period 2000–2010. A classification of types of flooding based on the hydrological/physical features of the territory separating fluvial floods (slow and flash floods) from urban flooding (related and unrelated to the ancient natural drainage network—FREN and FUNN) was used. Topographic maps from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1:10,000 and 1:25,000 scales), information from newspapers and daily rainfall data were used to define this classification and to validate the flooding occurrences. It was concluded that: (1) during 146 years, 131 flooding events with human damages occurred in the LMA; (2) 120 flooding events with material damages were registered in 1781 places for 11 years; (3) the spatial distribution of human and material damages was very different; (4) each type of flooding caused distinct human and material damages; (5) the importance of each type of flooding varied over time due to human interventions in the territory; (6) there is a clear decrease in the mortality associated with flooding even during the extreme flooding events. This study contributes for spatial planning and insurance companies, allowing to define the temporal evolution and spatial patterns of the types of flooding, as well as to understand their future damages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social impacts caused by floods and landslides in Portugal in the period of 1865-2010 are gathered in the DISASTER database. This database contains 1,902 hydro-geomorphologic cases that caused 1,248 fatalities (81% and 19% associated with floods and landslides, respectively). The use of the DISASTER database allowed for: (i) the analysis of the frequency and the temporal evolution of fatal floods and landslides; (ii) the analysis of the spatio-temporal distribution of fatalities; (iii) the identification of the most deadly flood and landside types; (iv) the verification of gender tendencies in mortalities; and (v) the evaluation of individual and societal risk. The highest number of flood and landslide cases and related mortalities occurred in the period of 1935-1969. After this period, the number of flood and landslide mortalities decreased, although landslide fatalities remained higher than those registered in the period of 1865-1934. The occurrence of flood fatalities was widespread in the country, with an important cluster in the Lisbon region and in the Tagus valley, while fatalities caused by landslides mainly occurred in the north of the Tagus valley. Flash floods caused the majority of fatalities associated with floods, while falls and flows were responsible for the highest number of fatalities associated with landslides. Males were found to have the highest frequency of fatalities. In the case of floods, the majority of fatalities were found both outdoors and inside of buildings in rural areas while fatalities inside buildings were dominant in landslide cases, mostly in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A valuable aid to assessing and managing flood risk lies in a reliable database of historical floods. In this study, a newspaper-based flood database for Shanghai (NFDS) for the period 1949-2009 was developed through a systematic scanning of newspapers. After calibration and validation of the database, Mann-Kendall tests and correlation analysis were applied to detect possible changes in flood frequencies. The analysis was carried out for three different flood types: overbank flood, agricultural waterlogging, and urban waterlogging. The compiled NFDS registered 146 floods and 92% of them occurred in the flood-prone season from June to September. The statistical analyses showed that both the annual flood and the floods in June-August increased significantly. Urban waterlogging showed a very strong increasing trend, probably because of insufficient capacity of urban drainage system and impacts of rapid urbanization. By contrast, the decrease in overbank flooding and the slight increase in agricultural waterlogging were likely because of the construction of river levees and seawalls and the upgrade of agricultural drainage systems, respectively. This study demonstrated the usefulness of local newspapers in building a historical flood database and in assessing flood characterization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the organizations in the world have realized the importance of the disaster data and are working on to collect the data's for planning the emergency relief activities. The data requirements for researchers are increasing in Turkey, especially in the city of Istanbul which has 8000 years of history. But databases on disasters are not satisfactory or systematically released. The paper evaluates the examples of the databases both in World and Turkey, identifies the standards and criteria to develop a new database for Istanbul City. The paper includes an evaluation of the collected disaster data of Byzantium, Ottoman and Republic Period for Istanbul City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]