EM-DAT: The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) International Disaster Database

EM-DAT was created with the initial support of the WHO and the Belgian Government. EM-DAT is supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA).

The main objective of the database is to serve the purposes of humanitarian action at national and international levels. It is an initiative aimed to rationalise decision making for disaster preparedness, as well as providing an objective base for vulnerability assessment and priority setting. For example, it allows on to decide whether floods in a given country are more significant in terms of its human impact than earthquakes or whether a country is more vulnerable than another for computing resources is.