FAQ

EM-DAT, the Emergency Events Database, is a global database of disasters triggered by natural hazards and technological disasters from 1900 to the present. It has been maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) since 1988. EM-DAT records the occurrence and the human and economic impacts of disasters at the country level, with over 27,000 disaster records. See the Overview of EM-DAT and Data Structure and Content.

Two things can explain this.

• Scope. EM-DAT only publishes records of disasters that are confirmed by at least two sources and meet at least one of its Entry Criteria: 10 or more deaths, 100 or more people affected, a call for international assistance, or an emergency declaration.
• Publication delay. New events and impact figures are encoded daily. Once the impact figures stabilize, they are selected for publication and become available in the public data after the weekly update routine, usually run on Mondays (see Encoding, Quality Control, and Validation Procedure).

If you have reliable sources for an event you believe is missing, please share that information with us.

An empty cell means either that the figure is unreported in EM-DAT sources or that the disaster had no impact of that kind. EM-DAT does not distinguish between the two, so an empty cell must never be read as a confirmed absence of impact.

These missing values are not randomly distributed and depend on hazard and impact types. Economic losses are reported far less often than human impacts, and insured damage is concentrated in countries with insurance coverage. See Accounting Biases and this note on missing values and imputation.

All monetary values are in thousands of US dollars (‘000 US$). The unadjusted columns give the value at the time of the disaster, and the “Adjusted” columns correct them for inflation using the US Consumer Price Index (see Economic Adjustment). Economic losses are much less often reported than human impacts, especially outside high-impact disasters and insured markets (see Economic Impact Variables and Accounting Biases).

This is expected. EM-DAT is a living database, and the last two years of data are updated frequently, following the Encoding, Quality Control, and Validation Procedure.

• Figures for a recent event are provisional. As more mature sources become available, the database manager may update them.
• All entries from the previous year are systematically reviewed during the annual validation, which usually takes place at the beginning of the following year.
• Thematic reviews may revise a whole disaster type, period, or region at once. Substantial content updates are announced in the release notes.

The Entry Date and Last Update columns let you track when a record was created and last modified. For work that must remain reproducible, cite your access date and consider using the EM-DAT Archive, which provides fixed, citable snapshots.

No. EM-DAT covers disasters triggered by natural hazards and technological disasters, the latter being unintentional accidents. Situations of conflict, violence, and terrorism are out of scope (see General Definitions and Concepts). The former ‘Complex’ disaster group, which covered major famines not primarily driven by drought, was removed in September 2023 (14 entries); those records remain available in the legacy backup table.

With caution. The number of recorded disasters is influenced by EM-DAT’s external sources, their level of reporting precision, and whether they aggregate impacts from multiple hazards. The sharp rise in recorded disasters from the 1960s onward largely reflects improvements in reporting, communication technology, and the growth of the database itself, rather than a change in the underlying frequency of hazards (see Time Bias). Excluding pre-2000 data from trend analyses is recommended; these records are flagged in the Historic column. Even after 2000, threshold, geographic, hazard-related, and accounting biases remain. See Known Issues and Limitations.

There is no universal protocol governing how disaster losses are reported. Sources differ in how they define the start and end of an event, its geographical footprint, what counts as an “affected” person, and sometimes even the disaster type. EM-DAT reports the figures selected from its sources and does not model or harmonize them, apart from the Economic Adjustment for inflation. These systemic differences are discussed in General Issues.

Partly. EM-DAT collects and reports impact figures at the country level only; they are not disaggregated between regions. However, the affected areas are listed in the GADM Admin Units column, which gives the Admin-1 or Admin-2 units affected by the disaster using the GADM 4.1 spatial reference. This geocoding is limited to non-biological natural hazards from 2000 onwards (see Spatial Information and Geocoding). The Location, Latitude, Longitude, and River Basin columns provide additional spatial context.

In other words, you can know which regions were affected, but not how the losses were distributed among them. If you need subnational impact estimates, several augmented datasets built on EM-DAT are listed under Additional Resources.

Yes, for non-commercial uses. Access to the EM-DAT Public Data is free of charge after registration for academic organizations, universities, non-profit research institutions, international public organizations, national governments, and media agencies, for research, teaching, or information purposes. Use is conditional on accepting the Terms of Use. Commercial use requires a paid Database License Agreement.

Free is not the same as open. Under standard international definitions, such as the Open Definition, which requires that data can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose, neither the Public Data nor the Archive qualifies as open data:

• The Public Data requires registration, is restricted to non-commercial use, and does not permit redistribution or the creation of derivative databases.
• The EM-DAT Archive is published under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which excludes both commercial use and derivative works.

What EM-DAT aims to be is free and FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, at no cost, for the research, humanitarian, and public-interest community. The EM-DAT Archive was created specifically to serve those principles.

It depends on the product.

EM-DAT Public Data: no. Under the Terms of Use, users agree not to reproduce, copy, communicate, lend, or otherwise distribute EM-DAT or a substantial part of it, not to create substitute or derivative databases, and not to share any portion of it with unauthorized users.

EM-DAT Archive: within the limits of its license. The Archive is published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, which allows you to share the dataset as it is, with proper attribution, for non-commercial purposes. It does not allow you to distribute a modified version. In practice, linking to the Archive DOI is preferable to circulating a copy: it is citable, versioned, and guarantees that your readers get exactly the snapshot you used.

In both cases, you may of course publish analyses, aggregated figures, charts, and findings derived from EM-DAT, provided you follow the Attribution and Citation Policy.

If you need to share the data behind a paper, share the DisNo. identifiers. Publish your own variables and results alongside the DisNo. values you worked with. Anyone with EM-DAT access can then join your table back to the corresponding EM-DAT records. This satisfies journal and funder reproducibility requirements without redistributing the database itself, and it keeps your results explicitly linked to documented EM-DAT entries.

• The EM-DAT Archive is a validated, versioned, citable snapshot hosted on the UCLouvain Dataverse and adhering to FAIR principles. It is the preferred choice for reproducible research.
• The EM-DAT Public Data is the living database, updated weekly. It can also be used for research and teaching. It is the right choice when you need the most recent records, but bear in mind that the last two years of data are revised frequently, so any analysis covering them should be dated and treated as provisional.
• The HDX Country Profiles provide annual aggregated figures by country and disaster type.

See also Data Accessibility.

The EM-DAT API is only available to commercial users. The EM-DAT Archive can be accessed programmatically through the UCLouvain Dataverse, using the standard Dataverse API. This is the recommended route for scripted or reproducible workflows. However, fetching the Archive regularly is not useful, as new versions are released only about once a year. The HDX Country Profiles can also be accessed through the HDX API.

Proper citation requires at least the year of access, the EM-DAT acronym with the product used, and the corresponding URL or DOI. Full rules and examples are available in the Attribution and Citation Policy. For scientific publications, please also cite the database descriptor paper.

• Start with the spreadsheet. The public table is delivered as a single flat .xlsx file, so if you are comfortable with Excel, pivot tables and charts will get you a long way without any additional tooling.
• EM-VIEW is a dashboard for exploring and analyzing the EM-DAT data. Its source code is available if you want to customize it.
• The Python tutorials in this documentation cover basic operations, plotting, and mapping.
• The HDX Country Profiles are ready-to-use annual aggregates for quick country-level charts.

Further tools and augmented datasets are listed under Additional Resources. Note that most of these are not maintained by the EM-DAT team.

Please write to contact@cred.be.

For issues concerning specific events, describe the problem and include the list of DisNo. values concerned. For missing entries, keep in mind that CRED only publishes disasters for which reliable figures are available and corroborated by at least two sources; sending the sources you have is the most useful thing you can do.

If you have analyzed EM-DAT quality more broadly, we welcome your reports and publications. Reported issues also feed the automated checks that prevent errors from recurring. CRED reserves the right to modify the data following such notifications. See also Issue Reporting.

Since the end of the USAID funding in early 2025, sustaining the world’s collective disaster memory depends more than ever on the EM-DAT community. You can help by donating, signing the open letter, citing EM-DAT properly, reporting errors, sharing your work, or collaborating with us on research projects. All the options are described in Ways to Contribute.

By email at contact@cred.be, or by post at the address given on the Contact page. For commercial licensing, write to Ms. Regina Below, EM-DAT data manager, at regina.below@uclouvain.be (see the Terms of Use).