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Documenting Drought-Related Disasters

Until recently, drought events were inconsistently recorded in EM-DAT. Problems included inconsistent establishment of start and end dates, misattribution of losses, and difficulties with handling multiyear and multicountry events, mostly arising from the slow onset, spatially extensive, prolonged, and complex nature of drought. This article summarizes the procedures and results of a comprehensive review of 807 drought and 76 famine entries from 1900 to 2004. A standardized methodology has been developed for characterizing drought events that is consistent with all other natural hazards recorded in the database. The result consists in a reduction of 56% from the original number of drought entries, a 20% increase in the number of deaths and a 35% increase in economic losses. Based on the revised data, more than half of all deaths associated with natural hazards are now classified as drought related, and only floods rank higher in terms of the number of people affected.