Natural Disaster Hotspots

Provide global distribution of earthquake hazard.

Provided global source of place name.

Provided estimates of national Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Provided historical hazard-specific mortality and economic loss rates.

Provided methodology for spatially distributing national estimates of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) subnationally.

Provided year 2000 country boundaries.

Provided year 2000 gridded global population estimates.

Building upon a methodology pioneered by Sachs et al. (2003), a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) value (US$, 2000, purchase power parity adjusted (PPP)) is estimated for each grid cell. The process begins by determining the contribution of each subnational unit to national GDP using data of varied origin. The ratio of the subnational production estimate to the national GDP is the contribution ratio. To ensure uniformity, these contribution ratios are utilized with published World Bank estimates of GDP. Once a standardized value of subnational GDP has been calculated, this value is further subdivided by the total population within the subnational unit as determined using Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3) data. This subnational, per-person GDP value is multiplied by the population density per grid cell to estimate the GDP value on a per grid cell basis. Regional loss rates were derived from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) records, providing estimates of the hazard's impact. Combining the impact data with the frequency and distribution data of the Global Earthquake Hazard Distribution-peak ground acceleration dataset and the baseline productivity data provided by the spatially allocated GDP estimates resulted in crude estimates of the GDP at risk. In turn, these estimates are transformed into proportions of the original GDP estimates of the grid cells on a per grid cell basis. In order to more accurately reflect the confidence surrounding the proportionalities, they are further classified into deciles, 10 classes of approximately an equal number of grid cells. Areas of "No Data" are not necessarily without risk from hazards, but may rather be an artifact of a mask that excluded from analysis those areas with a population density less than 5 persons per square kilometer and without significant agriculture.