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Data

Global number of reported natural disasters by the number of deaths

What you should know about this indicator

  • 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. Of all EM-DAT disasters, we select geophysical, meteorological, hydrological, and climatological events, which include droughts, earthquakes, extreme temperatures, floods, glacial lake outburst floods, mass movements, extreme weather events, volcanic activity, and wildfires.
  • EM-DAT counts deaths as deceased and missing people combined, as a result of a natural disaster.
  • A disaster has an unknown number of deaths if there is no data available on the number of total deaths for that reported event.
Source
EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
October 29, 2025
Next expected update
October 2026
Date range
1900–2025
Unit
events

Related research and writing

Feautured image

Is the number of natural disasters increasing?

Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado

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
November 6, 2025
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 (2025). 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
November 6, 2025
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 (2025). 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: Global number of reported natural disasters by the number of deaths”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from EM-DAT. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 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 (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Global number of reported natural disasters by the number of deaths” [dataset]. EM-DAT, “The International Disasters Database” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.html (archived on March 4, 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://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.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://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.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://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-reported-by-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear