Data Accessibility
What are the Different EM-DAT Products?
- The living EM-DAT Public Data is the main data product, providing disaster impact details by event and country, updated weekly.
- The EM-DAT Archive is a validated backup of the EM-DAT Public Data shared to support open and reproducible scientific research.
- The EM-DAT HDX Country Profilessummarize yearly disaster data by type and country.
Note
Since the EM-DAT Archive and the EM-DAT HDX Country Profiles are directly derived from the EM-DAT Public Data, this portal is dedicated to the documentation of the EM-DAT Public Data.How to Download the EM-DAT Public Data?
The public EM-DAT records are accessible from our online data portal public.emdat.be. Access for non-commercial use is free after registration and subject to the Terms of Use. Access for Commercial Use is possible on the basis of an annual paid subscription (see Commercial License).
After registration and login, the data can be downloaded using the EM-DAT “Access Data” Tab or Toolbox (see the figure below) as a flat table in Microsoft Excel format (.xlsx). The EM-DAT database is described in the Data Structure Description section. In particular, the Column Description section contains the description of each column of the public table found in the Excel file.
Home Page of the Public Portal
How to Download the EM-DAT Archive data?
The EM-DAT Archive is available from the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) Dataverse. Hosted on a dataset repository under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, it adheres to FAIR principles. Therefore, should be the preferred choice for conducting research with EM-DAT.
The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) EM-DAT Country Profiles
In addition, annual data summaries per country (country profiles) are available for download on the Humanitarian Data eXchange platform (see more on HDX here). These consist of aggregated figures, updated weekly, in the following format :
| Column name | HXL code1 | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | #date +occurred |
Classifier | See Start Year in Hazard and Disaster Magnitude Units. |
| Country | #country +name |
Classifier | See Country in Column Description. |
| ISO | #country +code |
Classifier | See ISO in Column Description. |
| Disaster Group | #cause +group |
Classifier | See the Disaster Classification System. |
| Disaster Subgroup | #cause +subgroup |
Classifier | See the Disaster Classification System. |
| Disaster Type | #cause +type |
Classifier | See the Disaster Classification System. |
| Disaster Subtype | #cause +subtype |
Classifier | See the Disaster Classification System. |
| Total Events | #frequency |
Aggregated figure | Total count of events. |
| Total Affected | #affected +ind |
Aggregated figure | The sum of injured, affected, and homeless people (see Human Impact Variables). |
| Total Deaths | #affected +ind +killed |
Aggregated figure | The sum of dead and missing people (see Human Impact Variables). |
| Total Damage (USD, original) | Aggregated figure | The value of all damage and economic losses directly or indirectly related to the disasters, in the value of the year of occurrence, unadjusted for inflation (see Economic Impact Variables). | |
| Total Damage (USD, adjusted) | #value +usd |
Aggregated figure | See Economic Adjustment. |
| CPI | Reference value (annual) | Consumer Price Index, see Economic Adjustment. |
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Available in the second row, these terms are part of the Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) and used in the HDX API to annotate metadata across datasets. See more about the HXL standard. ↩︎