Dis/Counting disasters: The dangers of disaster data
By George W. Foden and Tanja D. Hendriks[1]
In early January 2025, wildfires caused havoc in Los Angeles, United States of America. Home to many of the world’s rich and famous, the widely reported on fires forced more than 200.000 people to evacuate the area, 16.000 homes and buildings went up in flames and 28 people lost their lives. The fires erupted as a consequence of dry conditions and strong winds, but numerous experts have pointed out that climate change aggravated the fires and exacerbated their impacts. Among others, the firefighters had to fight multiple fires simultaneously, for which their water infrastructure was not prepared. International media and affected celebrities themselves publicised the disaster widely, and the Grammy Awards honoured a group of firefighters on the red carpet to highlight their heroic work. In its aftermath, more than 650 million USD was raised for wildfire victims relief.
On 9 January 2025, shortly after the onset of the LA wildfires, a company that deals with ‘the entire value chain of reinsurance, primary insurance, and insurance-related risk solutions’, MUNICH RE, released a report entitled Natural Disasters 2024. Using ‘Climate Change is Showing its Claws’ as the headline for its press release, the company compiled information about what they termed ‘the 2024 natural disasters in figures’. In the report, they estimate the global losses incurred due to disasters at 320 billion USD, largely (93%) caused by extreme weather events, and they present a ranking of ‘the most devastating natural disasters of the year’. With the use of the terminology ‘natural disasters’ already indicative of the company’s lack of attention to (or even lack of awareness of) the socio-economic elements and political dynamics that create disasters, the ‘most devastating’ in this context refers exclusively to devastation calculable in financial figures and impacts. The top three disasters thus consisted of two hurricanes in the United States of America (Helene and Milton) and an earthquake in Japan, which each caused large scale infrastructural damage. The fact that at the same time, more than 30 million people across Southern Africa were experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity due to an El Nino induced drought, did not register or make these types of rankings. What does this discrepancy tell us?
Losing Count or Losing Track?
The African continent is at the forefront of combatting climate change impacts and effects, yet it is also the continent least likely to feature in rankings like the one made by companies such as MUNICH RE. In fact, in different tabs on its website, the company geographically groups ‘Americas’, ‘Europe’, ‘Asia-Pacific and Africa’ – a categorisation in complete contradistinction to where the impacts of climate change and related disasters are in fact experienced most severely. This likely makes sense for MUNICH RE and potential clients visiting their website, because the insurance industry is heavily skewed towards Europe and the Americas. Deloitte report that in 2023 the Middle East, Africa, and Asia were the regions with the most pronounced insurance coverage gap globally, with only 4% of disaster damages in Africa covered by insurance.
Insurance coverage gap per region. Source: Gallagher RE 2023 Natural Catastrophe and Climate Report https://www.ajg.com/gallagherre/news-and-insights/2023-natural-catastrophe-and-climate-report/
Insurance requires a quantification of the potential cost of a given disaster, but in many sub-Saharan countries this kind of data is simply not available. It is also the case that many disasters that impact the most vulnerable populations around the world are not as a result of a destructive force like a wildfire or earthquake that does significant property and infrastructure damage. Drought is an increasingly significant hazard, particularly for communities dependant on subsistence agriculture or with limited access to food markets, and whilst the cost to agricultural industry can be accounted for, the wider impact of price rises on poor populations is much harder to calculate. It is nevertheless a disaster for a significant number of people across countries like Malawi. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) currently estimates that as many as 5.7 million people are classified as IPC Phase 3 (in a food ‘crisis’) and will struggle to meet their nutritional needs. In areas where drought or extreme weather impacts agricultural businesses, an explicit dollar value can often be placed on the cost of a given disaster, but when the affected agriculture is predominantly subsistence farming, this figure is both much harder to calculate, and significantly more impactful for the affected households. In Malawi, the ongoing drought is a disaster on a massive scale, but it is inherently less quantifiable, and therefore more complicated to report on than other rapid onset disasters like storms or wildfires.
If more people are seen as being particularly vulnerable to a specific hazard, then the pressure to protect against that hazard increases. However, as we have seen in recent years in the southern region of Malawi in particular, the majority of the population are vulnerable to the impact of cyclonic storms like Cyclone Ana (2022) and Cyclone Freddy (2023), and the cost associated with recovery after those disasters is incredibly high and difficult to quantify meaningfully. This is because much reconstruction that takes place in Malawi is self-recovery, led by inhabitants themselves and conducted over months or years after the initial disaster has passed. The cost of the purchase of new materials by affected people, lost working hours in other sectors, impact to other livelihood opportunities, and the health cost of this self-recovery process is in many ways incalculable, but it plays a massive role in stalling development and complicating the alleviation of vulnerabilities where it takes place.
Not everything that counts can be counted, nor does everything that can be counted need to be. It is thus to a certain extent the practice of counting itself, the creation of specific types of disaster data, that shapes whether a disaster itself will be counted. This leads to different disasters being cared for differently, depending on the availability of data and the stories that can be told with that data. This suggests that by focusing on keeping count, we might actually be losing track of what actually matters and should matter in disaster governance and risk reduction efforts.
Similarly, in an earlier RADIX blog Ilan Kelman also called attention to the seductive qualities of quantitative disaster data, and the misleading comparisons they enable or even induce. This demonstrates the quandary faced by low-income countries like Malawi, and also highlights a core difficulty with the use of data in disaster risk reduction and management: the underlying inequalities that are part and parcel of the creation of the data, profoundly shape what it can and cannot tell us. This highlights the dangers comprised in disaster data: with no figures available, people fall through the cracks and disasters are discounted. Yet, when data are available, they enable comparisons that obscure underlying inequalities and distort our understandings of the empirical realities they are supposed to represent and reveal.
Disasters and Discrepancies
If we accept that quantitative data is often not capable of telling the full story of disaster impacts, then it is possible that the ‘most devastating disasters’ might actually be those currently discounted. Data is one tool among many that practitioners, policy planners, and advocates for DRR can use to explore how hazards influence the lives of people, but reducing disasters to a quantifiable impact is not always enlightening or even useful when trying to draw attention to vulnerabilities in affected populations.
If the inequalities that ultimately cause disasters and profoundly shape the creation of disaster data are forgotten or conveniently ignored during the compilation of reports, rankings and global overviews, these same inequalities will be perpetuated. As such, despite being only one of the many examples of how climate change can rear its ugly head, it is likely that the LA wildfires will become known as one of the ‘most devastating’ disasters in 2025.
[1] The authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally to the creation of this blog.