R2DN – Integrating Databases about Natural Disasters

Abstract

The historical data on disasters serves various purposes, such as managing the risk of future disasters, assessing risk in the insurance sector, and formulating policies to reduce disaster risks, among others. To meet these objectives, there are databases, covering several types of disasters. However, in addition to differences in purposes, scope, access, and coverage, there are variations in the criteria for registering a disaster in the database and the information used for this register. Due to these differences, we have a scenario with discrepancies of information across existing databases. In this study, we propose a repository that combines the main advantages of some global databases, the data needs due to multilateral agreement, and the possibility of integrating regional or specific databases. The proposed Natural Disaster Data Repository (R2DN) contains a data schema and a data mapping process with two of the main global databases (EM-DAT and DesInventar) and S2ID.