What can we learn about multi-hazard impact and risk dynamics from the international disaster database EM-DAT?

Understanding multi-hazard impacts and dynamics is essential for understanding risk and developing effective risk reduction measures. Recent studies have been reporting more extreme, compounding impacts from compound events, consecutive disasters or multi-hazards than from individual hazard events owing to complex dynamics and interdependencies of the risk drivers hazard, exposure and vulnerability. As our current understanding of these impacts is primarily based on individual notable events, this study aims to contribute with a systematic review and comparison of socio-economic impacts from historical single- versus multi-hazard events globally. To this end we analyze the data of the international disaster database EM-DAT, which is the main publicly available source that contains quantitative information on socio-economic impacts with global coverage and widely-used in disaster risk science. Being aware of its known issues and limitations, including biases and inconsistencies, we also investigate and evaluate its trustworthiness for the purpose of gaining understanding on multi-hazard impact and risk dynamics.