Related topics: japan · earthquake

Why water must be at the heart of climate action

The Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience at the University of Colorado Boulder along with Castalia Advisors were commissioned by WaterAid's Resilient Water Accelerator (RWA), the Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity ...

Animated maps reveal true level of devastation in Ukraine

Two years of war in Ukraine have caused widespread devastation to the country's citizenry, infrastructure and environment, and new research utilizing publicly accessible satellite imagery lays bare the scope of destruction.

Heritage ERS-2 satellite returns to Earth

Launched in 1995, ERS-2 was a pioneering Earth observation satellite that greatly influenced our understanding of our planet and climate change. Despite an intended operational life of only three years, the satellite had ...

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Disaster

A disaster is a natural or man-made hazard that has come to fruition, resulting in an event of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the environment. A disaster can be ostensively defined as any tragic event with great loss stemming from events such as earthquakes, floods, catastrophic accidents, fires, or explosions.

In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk. These risks are the product of hazards and vulnerability. Hazards that strike in areas with low vulnerability are not considered a disaster, as is the case in uninhabited regions.

Developing countries suffer the greatest costs when a disaster hits – more than 95 percent of all deaths caused by disasters occur in developing countries and underdeveloped countries, and losses due to natural disasters are 20 times greater (as a percentage of GDP) in developing countries than in industrialized countries.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA