Natural disasters data book 2022: An analytical overview

The Asian Disaster Reduction Center (ADRC) publishes the Natural Disaster Databook annually to provide statistical and analytical perspectives of disaster data. For its 2022 issue, ADRC used the data from the Emergency Event Database (EM-DAT) downloaded on 16 May 2023 to analyze the number of occurrences, deaths, people affected, and economic losses from disaster events – focusing only on eight disaster types: drought, earthquake, extreme temperature, flood, landslide, storm, wildfire, and volcanic activity.

The analysis compares the following:

• Comparison of disasters in 2022 with disasters in the last 30 years (1992-2021)

• Comparison of climate-related disasters in 2022 with climate-related disasters in the last 30 years (1992-2021)

• Comparison of the COVID-19 situations between global level and regional level (highlighting the situations in ADRC member countries)

In 2022, a total of 388 disasters occurred globally. This is higher compared to the annual average for the past 30 years (1992-2021), which is 340. Among the most devasting disasters in 2022 were floods in Pakistan (June to September), droughts in Africa (e.g., Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan, China, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, and Mali), typhoons in the Philippines (e.g., Megi in April and Nalgae in October), and hurricanes (e.g., Hurricane Ian in Cuba and Hurricane Fiona in Dominican Republic). While flood was the most frequent disaster in 2022, extreme temperature caused the most deaths (16,416 deaths) accounting to more than half of all disaster-related deaths.