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People affected by natural disasters

EM-DAT
See all data and research on:
Natural Disasters

What you should know about this indicator

  • EM-DAT counts injured as people with physical injuries, trauma, or illness requiring immediate medical assistance due to the disaster.
  • Affected people are those requiring immediate assistance due to the disaster.
  • EM-DAT counts homeless as people requiring shelter due to their house being destroyed or heavily damaged during the disaster.
  • The total number of affected people is the sum of those injured, affected, and left homeless after a disaster.
  • EM-DAT defines a disaster as a situation or event which overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request to the national or international level for external assistance; an unforeseen and often sudden event that causes great damage, destruction, and human suffering.
  • Drought is defined as an extended period of unusually low precipitation that produces a shortage of water for people, animals, and plants. Drought is different from most other hazards in that it develops slowly, sometimes even over the years, and its onset is generally difficult to detect.
  • An earthquake is defined as a sudden movement of a block of the Earth's crust along a geological fault and associated ground shaking. The data includes the impacts of earthquake events, aftershocks and tsunamis.
  • Extreme temperature is used as a general term for temperature variations above (extreme heat) or below (extreme cold) normal conditions. Deaths from extreme temperatures are often indirect, meaning they are not reported or quantified without additional analysis and modelling. Some countries or regions increasingly do this work, but records are very geographically and temporally incomplete. This makes it hard to discern trends over time, or differences between countries.
  • Storms include tornadoes, hailstorms, thunderstorms, sandstorms, blizzards, and extreme wind events.
  • Flood is used as a general term for the overflow of water from a stream channel onto normally dry land in the floodplain (riverine flooding), higher-than-normal levels along the coast (coastal flooding) and in lakes or reservoirs as well as ponding of water at or near the point where the rain fell (flash floods). We also include glacial lake outburst floods in this category.
  • Volcanic activity is defined as any type of volcanic event near an opening/vent in the Earth's surface including volcanic eruptions of lava, ash, hot vapor, gas, and pyroclastic material.
  • A wildfire is defined as any uncontrolled and non-prescribed combustion or burning of plants in a natural setting such as a forest, grassland, brush land or tundra, which consumes natural fuels and spreads based on environmental conditions (e.g., wind, or topography). Wildfires can be triggered by lightning or human actions.
  • A landslide is the downslope movement of rock, soil, or debris under gravity. This includes both wet mass movements (such as mudflows triggered by heavy rain or snowmelt) and dry mass movements (such as rockfalls).
People affected by natural disasters
EM-DAT
Total number of people affected by a natural disaster.
Source
EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
April 30, 2026
Next expected update
April 2027
Date range
1900–2026
Unit
people

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

EM-DAT – The International Disasters Database

EM-DAT contains data on the occurrence and impacts of mass disasters worldwide from 1900 to the present day. EM-DAT data includes all categories classified as "natural disasters" (distinguished from technological disasters, such as oil spills and industrial accidents). This includes those from drought, earthquakes, extreme temperatures, extreme weather, floods, glacial lake outburst floods, mass movements, volcanic activity, and wildfires.

Retrieved on
April 30, 2026
Retrieved from
https://emdat.be/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
EM-DAT - The International Disasters Database (2026). Maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), part of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Brussels, Belgium.

EM-DAT contains data on the occurrence and impacts of mass disasters worldwide from 1900 to the present day. EM-DAT data includes all categories classified as "natural disasters" (distinguished from technological disasters, such as oil spills and industrial accidents). This includes those from drought, earthquakes, extreme temperatures, extreme weather, floods, glacial lake outburst floods, mass movements, volcanic activity, and wildfires.

Retrieved on
April 30, 2026
Retrieved from
https://emdat.be/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
EM-DAT - The International Disasters Database (2026). Maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), part of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Brussels, Belgium.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: People affected by natural disasters”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2022) - “Natural Disasters”. Data adapted from EM-DAT. Retrieved from https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260505-133427/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.html [online resource] (archived on May 5, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “People affected by natural disasters – EM-DAT” [dataset]. EM-DAT, “The International Disasters Database” [original data]. Retrieved May 8, 2026 from https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260505-133427/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.html (archived on May 5, 2026).

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://auto-epoch.owid.pages.dev/grapher/total-affected-by-natural-disasters.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear