What is EM-DAT?

EM-DAT, the Emergency Events Database, is the world’s most widely used and trusted global database for tracking natural and technological disasters. It has been maintained since 1988 by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), which is part of UCLouvain.

The database currently contains data on the occurrence and impacts of over 27,000 mass disasters worldwide, from 1900 to the present day. It covers floods, storms, earthquakes, droughts, wildfires, extreme temperatures, landslides, volcanic activity, and technological accidents, across virtually every country on earth.

Crucially, it is:

• Open access (for non-commercial use)
• Globally comparable, using transparent and consistent inclusion criteria
• Cross-verified across multiple sources (UN agencies, NGOs, reinsurance companies, research institutes, press agencies)
• The reference dataset for thousands of peer-reviewed studies, national risk assessments, and international policy processes

If you have ever read a paper or report about global disaster trends, the probability is high that EM-DAT was the data source behind it.

Why is it at risk?

For more than 25 years, EM-DAT was primarily funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Following the recent dismantling of USAID, that funding is gone, and no sustainable alternative has been secured.

This is not a minor budget shortfall. Without a replacement funding mechanism, EM-DAT risks shutting down entirely.

Why does it matter?

The open letter drafted in support of EM-DAT puts it well: in an era of intensifying climate extremes, cascading risks, and compounding crises, reliable data are not a luxury. They are the infrastructure for informed decision-making.

Concretely, EM-DAT underpins:

• Disaster risk reduction and prevention policies, used by governments to assess national risks and prioritise investments
• Humanitarian operations, relied upon by multilateral agencies and NGOs to plan and forecast needs
• Climate research, providing historical baselines for understanding trends in extreme weather events
• Monitoring of global commitments, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the SDGs, and the Paris Agreement
• Insurance and risk modelling, used by the private sector alongside other data to benchmark losses and refine exposure models

EM-DAT’s value is not just in the quantity of records. It lies in the rigour and consistency of its methodology over time and across countries. That is exactly what makes it irreplaceable. In a world awash with data, curated and quality-controlled datasets of this kind are rare. If EM-DAT were to close, the result would not be a smooth substitution. It would be fragmentation, proprietary data silos, and reduced access, particularly for lower-income countries that are already under-represented in global evidence.

A personal note

I signed the open letter after being informed of the issue by my colleague Prof. Niko Speybroeck, a leading epidemiologist at UCLouvain and program director of the CRED.

I do not have direct expertise in disaster epidemiology. But I do care about open data, open science, and the integrity of global research infrastructure. And EM-DAT is exactly the kind of resource that the whole scientific community relies on, often without fully realising it.

How you can help

If you share these values, I encourage you to sign the open letter: “The World’s collective disaster memory must be preserved”.

The letter calls on governments, multilateral development banks, philanthropic foundations, and international organisations to step forward with a coordinated and sustainable funding arrangement for EM-DAT. The cost of maintaining the world’s primary disaster database is modest set against the billions spent on disaster response and recovery each year. The cost of losing it would be profound.

Please also consider sharing this post or the open letter with your own network (researchers, policymakers, students, practitioners, or anyone who cares about data-driven approaches to global challenges).

More information

• EM-DAT website: https://www.emdat.be/
• Open letter: https://openletter.earth/the-worlds-collective-disaster-memory-must-be-preserved-66c88c44
• CRED at UCLouvain: https://www.uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/irss/cred-epidemiology-of-disasters

As always, if you have any thoughts or questions related to this post, feel free to leave a comment below.