Hazard Info & Monitoring Tools
Print this pageThis part of the toolkit provides an overview of different types of hazards as well as information on monitoring of these hazards:
The overview of the various hazards includes general characteristics, potential humanitarian impact, and factors contributing to vulnerability. It also provides useful information on monitoring tools as well as tips on where to find more detailed information.
Introduction
Disaster Risk occurs when a population is exposed to a natural hazard. The risk is a function of the probability of a hazard occurring, and the level of the exposed population's vulnerability. Many different sources - public and private; scientific, technical and humanitarian; global, national and local; provide information about the current status of particular disaster risks.
EPS produces a quarterly analysis of upcoming disaster risk trends. The current Disaster Risk Trends issue is available here (3rd quarter 2008). For previous issues, see the following links: 1st quarter 2008, 4th quarter 2007, 3d quarter 2007.
Disaster Risk Trends Survey:
EPS would be grateful if you could respond to the Survey on the Disaster Risk Trends. Please send your answers to benedek@un.org.
This part will help you understand different types of hazards and guide your to methods for monitoring risks. Monitoring involves keeping track of a number of different sources, and attempting to triangulate the available information to give the best up to date picture of current disaster risk.
What you will find in this section
You will find dedicated pages on different hazards, by navigating the menu to the left or by clicking on the various hazards in the below list. Each section contains standard hazard definitions, characteristics of the hazard, risk analysis assistance - how to determine whether a particular area is at risk of that type of hazard - and an outline of the potential humanitarian effects, both primary and secondary, that each type of disaster could have on exposed populations. For this guide, we have used the standard hazard categories developed by CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters).
- Climate Change: an overview of the potential impact of climate change on the humanitarian situation
- Drought: a review of the causes of drought and its effects
- Earthquakes: including graphic representations of how earthquakes occur
- Epidemics: an selected overview of the more common epidemics
- Extreme Temperature: covering both extreme cold and heatwaves
- Flood: including flash floods, river floods and coastal floods
- Food Insecurity: an overview of the causes and review of livelihood protection measures
- Insect Infestations: including an explanation of the locust lifecycle and locust risk
- Pandemic: covering both avian and human influenza
- Slides: covering landslides, mudslides and related events
- Volcano: covering the various risks associated with volcanoes, including eruptions, gas emissions and lahars
- Wave / Surge: including tsunamis
- Forest Fires: an often forgotten potential disaster
- Windstorms: including hurricanes, tropical cyclones, thunderstorms and tornadoes
Multi-hazard monitoring tools
In each section of the various hazards, you will find dedicated monitoring sites. There are also several sources for multihazard monitoring. Below are some of the more common:
- Virtual OSOCC enables information exchange by all actors of the international disaster response community. All Virtual OSOCC users have the opportunity to create e-mail and sms messages that are sent automatically to subscribers to inform about critical situation updates during disaster response operations.
- GDACS (The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System) provides near real-time alerts about natural disasters around the world and tools to facilitate response coordination, including media monitoring, map catalogues and Virtual On-Site Operations Coordination Centre.
- HewsWeb.org (The Humanitarian Early Warning Service, a service provided by the IASC Sub-WG on Preparedness and Contingency Planning) is an inter-agency common platform for humanitarian early warnings and forecasts for natural hazards
- WMO's Severe Weather Information Centre provides weather forecasts and warnings
- Meteoalarm.eu integrates all important severe weather information originating from the official National Public Weather Services across a large number of European countries. It is developed for EUMETNET, the Network of European Meteorological Services.
- Reliefweb
- Reuters AlertNet
- IRIN News, United Nations Integrated Regional Information Networks
- World Bank Natural Disaster Hotspots
- Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) Emergency Disasters Database (EM-DAT) gives valuable information on historical disaster data