EM-DAT, the Emergency Events Database, is the most widely used and trusted global disaster database for tracking natural and technological disasters by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), UCLouvain, Belgium (www.emdat.be)..) For over thirty years, it has supported research, policy-making, humanitarian efforts, and risk management worldwide. This vital global public resource now faces the risk of termination due to the absence of sustainable funding following the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

If EM-DAT were to cease operations, the consequences would not be abstract; they would be practical, immediate and damaging.

EM-DAT offers a carefully assembled, globally comparable database of disasters, including their human and economic impacts. Governments utilise it to inform policies, assess national risks and prioritise prevention and resilience efforts. Multilateral agencies depend on it to distribute resources across countries and regions and monitor worldwide trends. Humanitarian groups rely on it to plan their operations and forecast their needs. Researchers use it to identify hazardous climate-related events, technological accidents, and complex emergencies. Insurance companies and risk consultancies draw on this information alongside other data sources to benchmark loss data, refine exposure models, and support more accurate risk assessments and advisory services.

Without EM-DAT, the global community would lose a critical shared empirical foundation for assessing disaster impacts and trends.

In an era of intensifying climate extremes, cascading risks, and compounding crises, reliable data are not a luxury. They are the infrastructure for informed decision-making. Disaster risk reduction, early warning systems, anticipatory action, and climate adaptation all require credible historical baselines. We cannot measure progress against the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Sustainable Development Goals, or the Paris Agreement without consistent data on disaster impacts. We cannot credibly argue for risk-informed development if the underlying evidence base is fragmented.

EM-DAT’s value lies not only in the quantity of its records but also in the rigour of its methodology. The database applies transparent inclusion criteria, cross-checks multiple sources, and standardises reporting across countries and over time. This consistency allows for comparisons across time and space. It enables the detection of trends in mortality, affected populations, and economic losses, and helps distinguish between improvements in reporting and genuine changes in hazard occurrence, exposure or vulnerability. In a digital age characterised by an abundance of data, curated and quality-controlled datasets of this kind are both rare and irreplaceable.

If EM-DAT were to cease operations, the likely outcome would not be a seamless substitution. Instead, we would see a proliferation of partial, proprietary, and inconsistent datasets. Access would become more fragmented. Comparability would erode. Lower-income countries, which already struggle to collect reliable information, would be disproportionately affected. The global South would once again be at risk of being under-represented in the evidence that shapes global policy.

The irony is striking. At a time when the international community is calling for improved risk analytics, anticipatory humanitarian financing, and more evidence-based adaptation planning, we risk dismantling one of the few truly global, open, and independent sources of information needed to achieve these goals.

EM-DAT should be recognised for what it truly is: a global public good. Like meteorological observation systems, disease surveillance networks, or financial reporting standards, it serves the collective interest. Yet, unlike these other global information ecosystems, it lacks a stable, pooled, and predictable funding mechanism.

The current situation exposes a structural weakness in how we finance global knowledge goods. We depend too heavily on short-term project funding to sustain resources that require long-term stewardship. Databases like EM-DAT demand continuous updating, methodological oversight, verification, curation and management. They cannot simply be built once and left unattended. They require institutional memory and sustained technical expertise.

The time for action is now! We call on governments, multilateral development banks, philanthropic foundations and international organisations to act decisively. A modest, coordinated funding arrangement could secure EM-DAT’s future for the coming decades. Set against the billions spent annually on disaster response and recovery, the cost of maintaining the world’s primary disaster database is quite literally negligible.

The alternative is far more expensive.

Without a shared global dataset, risk assessments will lose coherence. Policy debates will be shaped by inconsistent numbers. Investment by governments, by corporations, and individuals alike will rest on weaker foundations. The ability to hold ourselves accountable for reducing disaster losses will diminish. Ultimately, lives and livelihoods are put at greater risk because we failed to safeguard the data that inform anticipatory action, disaster risk reduction, and damage prevention.

EM-DAT has served the global community faithfully for decades. It has informed thousands of peer-reviewed studies, many national risk assessments, and countless international policy processes. Its discontinuation would leave a void that cannot be filled.

We urge those with the capacity to support this indispensable global public good to step forward. The cost of sustaining EM-DAT is modest. The cost of losing it would be profound.

Drafted by:

Prof. Dewald van Niekerk (Head: African Centre for Disaster Studies, Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management, North-West University, South Africa)

Prof. Ilan Noy (Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and the Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy).

Associate Prof. Albert J. Kettner (Director DFO - Flood Observatories, INSTAAR, University of Colorado, USA)

Prof. Gabriele Messori (Director of the Swedish Centre for Impacts of Climate Extremes, Uppsala University, Sweden)