Updates to R package emdatr: More than 21000 Natural Disasters since 1900

The International Disaster Database, EMDAT database from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED, Belgium) is often used as a reference for losses on human life and property resulting from select natural and man-made disasters. The goal of the emdatr package is to improve the EMDAT database by promoting its use, shedding light on its limitations, and making analysis of the data easier using R

Major updates in emdatr v0.3:

• Latest data from EMDAT has been included, additional data on loss 'normalization' also updated when available.
• Vignette has been changed from a PDF to a markdown document.

Here is the emdatr package home page on CRAN.

Updates to R package emdatr: Global Disaster Losses from the EMDAT Database

The EMDAT database provides valuable information on human and financial losses from natural disasters around the world. Some of the issues with the EMDAT data are lack of entire data accessibility, static and inconsistent summary reports, and the lack of auxiliary financial and demographic data. The emdatr package addresses some of these issues. 

Major updates in emdatr v0.2:

• Data has been updated to include the whole of 2013.
• Data is now hosted on bitbucket.org and only a sample is provided with the package. Package has the functionality to extract the entire data.
• A new vignette which explains the raw data clean-up and enhancement procedure and which also demonstrates use of the package.

Here is the emdatr package home page on CRAN. Below is a summary graphic on number of natural disasters by decade obtained using the package.

New R package emdatr: Global Disaster Losses from the EM-DAT Database

The International Disaster Database EM-DAT from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED, Belgium) is often used as a reference for losses on human life and property resulting from natural and man-made disasters. This database has over 20,000 country-level records from the early 1900s to the present. Data is available for free from EMDAT.

Some issues with EM-DAT data and reports:

• Country names used by EMDAT are not always the same as those used by ISO 3166 convention. This issue is relevant when making spatial maps using R. 
• Information such as GDP and population from the year of occurrence of the disaster have to be used to "normalize" or adjust monetary losses from the past. The EMDAT database does not provide such information. 
• Annual reports published by EMDAT are not consistent with one another in terms of number of disasters per year or the total number of people affected/killed. For instance, number of diasters in 2002 were reported to be 428 in the ADSR 2012 report. But the same number in the 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008 reports is 421, 421, 422 and 421, respectively!

R package emdatr:

• comes with pre-processed and cleaned EMDAT data
• includes above-mentioned additional country-level information
• has functionality to extract desired subsets of the data
• through the graphics and modeling capabilities provided by R, much more can be accomplished through this R package and the R language, than conventional spreadsheet analyses
• by making the analysis transparent, the problems with the presentation of summary statistics could be addressed

The home page for the package presents some examples and graphics. Please see - https://github.com/RationShop/emdatr

Below are the relevant CRAN and GitHub sites:

• CRAN package repository
• GitHub site for the preliminary work towards the R package emdatr
• GitHub site for the final R package emdatr

Please let me know if you find any errors or if you have any comments or suggestions.

Towards the R package emdat: Losses from Global Disasters, Part 1

The International Disaster Database, EM-DAT from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED, Belgium) is often used as a reference for losses on human life and property resulting from natural and man-made disasters. This database has over 20,000 country-level records from the early 1900s to the present. Data is available for free from EMDAT.

Some Cons:

• Some cleaning of the data is required. For instance, the country names used by EMDAT are not always the same as those used by ISO. Hence, making spatial maps in R would involving fixing these names. 
• Information such as GDP, population and Consumer Price Index have to be used to "normalize" or adjust monetary losses from the past. The EMDAT database does not provide such information. 
• Annual reports published by EMDAT are not consistent with one another in terms of number of disasters per year or the total number of people affected/killed.

My goal is to create an R package which comes with pre-processed and cleaned EMDAT data and which would also include above-mentioned additional country-level information. Moreover, this R package would have the functionality to extract and analyze the data.

Here is a preliminary analysis of the data. Please see - https://github.com/RationShop/emdat/blob/master/publish_part1.md

All code and graphics are at my GitHub site - https://github.com/RationShop/emdat