Talk:Disaster

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Nuckollsmelanie, Kmasuda7, Bwilson96.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 19:34, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

definition of disaster
What is the current standard definition of a disaster? Is there a consensus in literature? Does a disaster by definition kill people? Fsikkema (talk) 17:12, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Natural and man made disaster
Examples of natural hazards include: avalanche, coastal flooding, cold wave, drought, earthquake, hail, heat wave, hurricane (tropical cyclone), ice storm, landslide, lightning, riverine flooding, strong wind, tornado, tsunami, volcanic activity, wildfire, winter weather.[6] Anthropogenic hazards can be grouped into societal hazards (criminality, civil disorder, terrorism, war, industrial hazards, engineering hazards, power outage, fire; hazards caused by transportation and environmental hazards. 106.51.242.229 (talk) 14:44, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Re-tooling this article to better reflect research
The closest we have to scholarly consensus argues that disasters result from the interaction between hazard systems and human systems, which make all disasters inherently man made. The current description gives this some credit, but still argues for the natural vs man made dichotomy. I think the wording of "difficult to draw" is misinterpreting the issue with the natural vs man made discussion.

I think it would be more accurate to lead with a description that disasters are human caused (i.e. a tornado is not a disaster until it produces human impacts), and than follow that with a section detail how it is still common to find the natural vs man made dichotomy discussed.

Additionally, I think this article needs a clearer link to disaster vulnerability, which describes a community, individuals, or organizations capacity to experience the negative impacts of disasters.

Finally, my question re: the responses section of the disaster list, is, who is this for? what unit of analysis (individual, organizational, government) is this intended for? Risky Bussiness (talk) 21:56, 8 December 2022 (UTC)


 * I also think "difficult to draw" is not right. Have you got a better wording that also expresses how other non-human systems can sometimes trigger or induce a disaster?
 * I agree the disaster list in responses is not too useful . In this section I have added something more general on the different ways/phases of managing disasters. Maybe the list itself could be transferred into disaster response as it seems to fit well there.
 * Speaking of research, I think what is also missing is some data on the numbers of disasters, losses and and economic costs, and trends. On the other hand, the best available data such as that from CRED only covers natural hazard-related disasters, so it might be better to place it in WP natural disaster and include the text as an excerpt in WP disaster Richarit (talk) 17:22, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
 * I've removed the last column of the table under "responses" because it was more of a how-to guide. I've broken up that long table and moved it to "classification". EMsmile (talk) 09:33, 24 May 2023 (UTC)