ReliefWeb Disasters List: Global Humanitarian Events from 1981 to Present
Updated 2mo ago
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Description
ReliefWeb, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), maintains this dataset of natural disasters with humanitarian impact from 1981 to the present. The data aggregates information from over 4,000 sources, including international agencies, governments, and research institutions.
Use Cases
Trend analysis of 'flooding' and 'drought' events over a 40-year period
Identifying geographic clusters of 'earthquake-tsunami' hazards
Linking historical disaster events to UN OCHA situation reports and assessments
Strengths
40-year temporal coverage starting from 1981
Aggregates data from 4,000+ verified humanitarian and government sources
Maintained by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
Limitations
Specific column schema and field definitions are not provided in the metadata
Potential bias toward events with significant humanitarian impact rather than all geophysical occurrences
Provenance
Source
ReliefWeb (UN OCHA)
Collection Method
Editorial monitoring and collection from 4,000+ sources
Time Range
1981 - 2026
Freshness
Updated through March 2026 according to source metadata.
Geography
Global
The dataset is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.