Tools

Disaster catalogues

In addition to chronological histories, catalogues of past disruptive events, disasters, and catastrophes were reviewed. There are a number of different types of catalogues available such as

·      The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED)¹³;

·      Thematic briefs and the event catalogue of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction¹⁴ and the United Nations Development Programme Disaster RiskReduction¹⁵; which also produces guidelines for establishing disaster loss databases

·      World Bank Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery.¹⁷

·      Catalogues of catastrophic events, focused on, but not exclusively documenting those that cause loss to the insurance and reinsurance industry maintained by major reinsurers such as Swiss Re¹⁸ and Munich Re¹⁹.

·      Organizations such as the UN’s Humanitarian Early Warning Service²⁰ monitor and publish ongoing crises and early warning indicators worldwide, and maintain a database of past events.

·      Global Risk Information Platform maintains a meta-catalogue of disaster databases²¹.

·      In addition there are several organizations that develop communities of risk management professionals who publish case studies, hold conferences on disaster mitigation and recovery, and act as information repositories.