Natural disaster

A natural disaster is the very harmful impact on a society or community brought by natural phenomenon or hazard. Some examples of natural hazards include avalanches, droughts, earthquakes, floods, heat waves, landslides - including submarine landslides, tropical cyclones, volcanic activity and wildfires. Additional natural hazards include blizzards, dust storms, firestorms, hails, ice storms, sinkholes, thunderstorms, tornadoes and tsunamis.

A natural disaster can cause loss of life or damage property. It typically causes economic damage. How bad the damage is depends on how well people are prepared for disasters and how strong the buildings, roads, and other structures are.

Scholars have argued the term "natural disaster" is unsuitable and should be abandoned. Instead, the simpler term disaster could be used. At the same time, the type of hazard would be specified. A disaster happens when a natural or human-made hazard impacts a vulnerable community. It results from the combination of the hazard and the exposure of a vulnerable society.

Nowadays it is hard to distinguish between "natural" and "human-made" disasters. The term "natural disaster" was already challenged in 1976. Human choices in architecture, fire risk, and resource management can cause or worsen natural disasters. Climate change also affects how often disasters due to extreme weather hazards happen. These "climate hazards" are floods, heat waves, wildfires, tropical cyclones, and the like.

Some things can make natural disasters worse. Examples are inadequate building norms, marginalization of people and poor choices on land use planning. Many developing countries do not have proper disaster risk reduction systems. This makes them more vulnerable to natural disasters than high income countries. An adverse event only becomes a disaster if it occurs in an area with a vulnerable population.

A natural disaster is the highly harmful impact on a society or community following a natural hazard event. The term "disaster" itself is defined as follows: "Disasters are serious disruptions to the functioning of a community that exceed its capacity to cope using its own resources. Disasters can be caused by natural, man-made and technological hazards, as well as various factors that influence the exposure and vulnerability of a community."

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) explains the relationship between natural disasters and natural hazards as follows: "Natural hazards and natural disasters are related but are not the same. A natural hazard is the threat of an event that will likely have a negative impact. A natural disaster is the negative impact following an actual occurrence of natural hazard in the event that it significantly harms a community. An example of the distinction between a natural hazard and a disaster is that an earthquake is the hazard which caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake disaster.

A natural hazard is a natural phenomenon that might have a negative effect on humans and other animals, or the environment. Natural hazard events can be classified into two broad categories: geophysical and biological. Natural hazards can be provoked or affected by anthropogenic processes, e.g. land-use change, drainage and construction.