Natural disasters

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From Wikipedia:Natural disasters

A natural disaster is the very harmful impact on a society or community brought by a natural phenomenon or hazard. Some examples of natural hazards include avalanches, droughts, earthquakes, floods, heat waves, landslides - including submarine landslides, tropical cyclones, volcanic activity and wildfires. Additional natural hazards include blizzards, dust storms, firestorms, hails, ice storms, sinkholes, thunderstorms, tornadoes and tsunamis.

A natural disaster can cause loss of life or property damage. It typically causes economic damage. How bad the damage is depends on how well people are prepared for disasters and how strong the buildings, roads, and other structures are.

Scholars have argued the term "natural disaster" is unsuitable and should be abandoned. Instead, the simpler term disaster could be used. At the same time, the type of hazard would be specified. A disaster happens when a natural or human-made hazard impacts a vulnerable community. It results from the combination of the hazard and the exposure of a vulnerable society.

Nowadays it is hard to distinguish between "natural" and "human-made" disasters. The term "natural disaster" was already challenged in 1976. Human choices in architecture, fire risk, and resource management can cause or worsen natural disasters. Climate change also affects how often disasters due to extreme weather hazards happen. These "climate hazards" are floods, heat waves, wildfires, tropical cyclones, and the like.

Some things can make natural disasters worse. Examples are inadequate building norms, marginalization of people and poor choices on land use planning. Many developing countries do not have proper disaster risk reduction systems. This makes them more vulnerable to natural disasters than high income countries. An adverse event only becomes a disaster if it occurs in an area with a vulnerable population.

Many of the most useful ways to prepare for a disaster are simple, low-cost projects that also help in everyday life. Storing water through rainwater harvesting and knowing how to keep it safe to drink (water quality) helps during both drought and flooding, when piped water often fails. Solar lighting or off-grid power systems can keep homes and businesses when the power goes out, and building with local hazards in mind, such as earthquake proofing for buildings, reduces damage before anything happens.

The goal of natural disaster preparedness, is not necessarily to "go it alone" after a disaster as is sometimes recommended by doomsday preppers, but rather to make sure that you and the other people in your local community have the tools that they need to be resilient, until normal services are restored. For example, clean water and electricity could be shut down for an extended window of time, or during exceptional droughts, having a steady supply of clean, accessible backup water in a well or rain harvesting system may allow you to survive a larger infrastructure failure.

Climate change is making some hazards more frequent. In southern Africa, for example, droughts have become more common since the 1960s.^[1] Local knowledge remains one of the most practical tools for coping. For example, even though climate change is making flooding worse in the Pacific Islands, traditional knowledge can still help with resilience: in Fiji, communities use traditional ways of reading weather signs, preserving food and warning neighbors to prepare for storms and floods, often at much lower cost than building seawalls or other large infrastructure.^[2]

One element that effects the extremity of disasters: tropical Pacific Ocean warms (El Niño) or cools (La Niña), shifting rainfall patterns around the world. These phases are known together as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). They make some disasters more likely in particular regions, and because they can be forecast months ahead, they give communities time to prepare. As of October 2026, an El Niño is underway and strengthening, and is expected to last into early 2027.^[3]

El Niño tends to bring flooding to East Africa and the southern United States; drought and fire risk to Australia, Indonesia and the Amazon; and weaker monsoon rains in India. It lowers grain harvests in parts of Africa, Australia and South and Southeast Asia, and has been linked to outbreaks of cholera in East Africa and of dengue and malaria in Colombia. Climate change is expected to make extreme El Niño events more common and harder to predict.^[4] La Niña often follows, with roughly the opposite effects. Long La Niña events are becoming more frequent: the one from 2020 to 2023 contributed to extreme drought in the Horn of Africa and flooding that affected about 15% of Pakistan's population.^[5]

• Find out which hazards have hit your area before. Many countries publish records of past disasters through your local government, the International Disaster Database at EM-DAT, and the Humanitarian Data Exchange hosts open data from humanitarian organisations.
• Ask older residents how they recognised and prepared for past floods, storms or droughts, and write it down or share with other members of your community.
• Start with projects that are useful every day, such as water storage and solar lighting, so they are working when an emergency comes.

Are You Ready?/Hurricanes

Are You Ready?/Tornadoes

Are You Ready?/Tsunamis

Are You Ready?/Volcanoes

Earthquakes

Flooding

From Earthquake proofing for buildings

Earthquake-proofing for buildings is an essential issue in geologically unstable areas. In order to assess on whether a region lies in an area where substantial earthquakes occur, we first take a look at the earthquake hazard map. Another thing to realize is that, despite the name, the building can (almost) never be made completely earthquake-proof, in most cases, the house will still suffer damage or may still be destroyed, but the "earthquake-proofing" will prevent or reduce the loss of human lives in the process.