Geo-Disasters v 1.0.0 – Geocoded EM-DAT climate-disaster footprints (1990 – 2023)

Geo-Disasters is a dataset that provides the geocoding for climate-related disasters reported in the international EM-DAT database for the period 1990–2023. It is based on the Gloabl Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL) administrative units,  it assigns quality flags, and contains two GeoPackage layers covering the subnational (45,121 polygons) and national (9,217 events) levels.

The Polygons were simplified with Douglas-Peucker (tol = 0.005°) and stored in EPSG 4326. Each event carries a four-level geocoding quality flag. The Boundaries are derived from GAUL 2015 and distributed under the GAUL Data Licence (non-commercial).

All details about the dataset are presented in our paper, please cite it when using the data: 
Teber, K., Weynants, M., Gans, F. & Mahecha, M. D. Geo-Disasters: Geocoding climate-related events in the international disaster database EM-DAT. published at Big Earth Data, at https://doi.org/10.1080/20964471.2025.2576274 (2025).

Code is available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29125907.v1 (snapshot version)

The files included are:

• disaster_national_90_23.gpkg: Individual Subnational Locations (separate polygons).
• disaster_subnational_90_23.gpkg: Aggregated event footprints.
• README_DATA.txt: Metadata file
• DataLicenseGAUL2015.pdf: Use and reuse license
• SHA256SUMS.txt: machine-readable list of checksums

Metadata 

Spatial extent: Lon: -180, 180; -90, 90 (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax) 

Coordinate ref system: EPSG:4326 - WGS 84 

Temporal coverage: 1990 to 2023

Format: gpkg