A disaster is a natural or man-made (or technological) hazard resulting in an event of substantial extent
causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the environment. A
disaster can be ostensively defined as any tragic event stemming from events such as earthquakes,
floods, catastrophic accidents, fires, or explosions. It is a phenomenon that can cause damage to life and
property and destroy the economic, social and cultural life of people.
In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk.
These risks are the product of a combination of both hazard/s and vulnerability. Hazards that strike in
areas with low vulnerability will never become disasters, as is the case in uninhabited regions.[1]
Developing countries suffer the greatest costs when a disaster hits – more than 95 percent of all deaths
caused by disasters occur in developing countries, and losses due to natural disasters are 20 times
greater (as a percentage of GDP) in developing countries than in industrialized countries.[2][3]
Natural disaster
Main article: Natural disaster
A natural disaster is a consequence when a natural hazard affects humans and/or the built environment.
Human vulnerability, and lack of appropriate emergency management, leads to financial, environmental, or
human impact. The resulting loss depends on the capacity of the population to support or resist the
disaster: their resilience. This understanding is concentrated in the formulation: "disasters occur when
hazards meet vulnerability". A natural hazard will hence never result in a natural disaster in areas without
vulnerability.
Various phenomena like earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, floods and cyclones are all natural
hazards that kill thousands of people and destroy billions of dollars of habitat and property each year.
However, natural