The Risk Data Hub loss datasets - The Risk Data Hub Historical Event Catalogue

In recent decades, the systematic collection of disaster related data has rapidly become a crucial concern; there is a growing recognition of the importance of post-disaster loss data, which are an essential mean to inform policy decisions oriented to reduce disaster risk as they are strictly linked to a variety of aspects: from the understanding of the impacts of occurred events to the calibration and validation of forecasting models till the evaluation of progresses in reducing disaster risk. Post-event damage and loss data have an intrinsic key role in all the phases of the DRM. Records of damage and losses occurred due to past disastrous events are not always available. Rarely countries have procedures and databases to collect and store post-event damage data; in many countries there are no organizations in charge of collecting data and open global datasets often have different quality of data (Petrucci at al., 2018). At European level loss and damage data are available through global multi-hazards databases (Wirtz, K., et al., 2014), but there is no authoritative loss database that can provide a trend at European level (De Groeve, 2015). The Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre (DRMKC) is currently developing a web-based geographical information system platform, the DRMKC Risk Data Hub (RDH), which aims at improving the access and share of curated EU-wide disaster risk information in order to support the implementation of international actions for DRM. Currently, Risk Data Hub structures the information into three modules that covers the Exposure Analysis, Historic Events – as an EU-wide loss and damage database and Risk Analysis module. The aim of this document is to report the methodology used to create the Historic Events module and the use that can be done of damage and loss data. The RDH Historical Event Catalogue consists in a collection of past events data occurred in EU created from a wide array of data published in several sources and datasets. This collection makes use of inventoried data; precisely different open access datasets have been interrogated collecting European-related records on past disastrous events. Both hazard and loss data have been systematically collected from various sources, checked, linked and homogenized to be provided in tabular and geospatial format in order to create the RDH Historical Event Catalogue. The work carried out consists in an effort done to improve the existing lack of homogeneous and comparable data on past events occurred across European Countries. This work represents an assemblage of sources that become complementary. Considering that each source focuses on different aspects of the impact events, the objective of the collection is to describe the phenomenon, gather data on loss and damage records and present the spatial extent of the damages. Finally, analyses intended to illustrate ways of examining global loss data and identifying possible trends in terms of peril or geographical prone areas within the European Countries are performed on the collected damage and loss data.