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EM-DAT Data Entry Procedures

When a disaster occurs, the related information is entered at three different levels:

1. The event/disaster level.
2. The country(ies) level.
3. The sources level.

Once all of the information is entered at each level, the record is validated before making the final figures and relevant information available to the public at an interval of 3 months (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Data Entry Methodology

Recording disasters:

When compiling disaster data, we are sometime confronted with methodological dilemma that can influence the analysis of the data. There are different ways to compile disasters.

When a disaster occurs, it can affect several countries. A hurricane that affects 5 countries can be entered as one disaster or as 5 different disasters.

EM-DAT has historically entered disasters at the country level. This means that a hurricane that affected 5 countries was entered into the database as 5 different entries, one for each of the affected countries (with 5 different Disaster Number).

In 2003, the EM-DAT team decided to improve the methodology for entering disasters into the database. Disasters are currently entered by event. This means that a multi-country disaster will have one identifier (one unique identifier number = Disaster Number), but will have the same number of entries as the number of countries that are affected.

For example, the December 26, 2004 tsunami affected 13 different countries. In EM-DAT, the tsunami has been entered as one event (with one unique Disaster Number) with 13 different country-level disasters.

How does this influence statistics from EM-DAT?

Regional, multi-country disasters represent only a small percentage of the total number of disasters that are compiled each year, though they often have a relatively important impact. However, the two methods of compiling disasters only affect the analysis of occurrence and not the human impact aspects