The 2024 Emergency Events Database Archive: The Year in Review and Historical Data Updates

The 2024 Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) Archive (Version 2) extends the 2023 Archive (Version 1) to 2024, providing a retrospective analysis of the newly added year, with 604 disasters that caused 89,030 deaths, affected 168.59 million people, and generated US$277.41 billion in losses. The new archive also enables direct comparison with the 2023 release (Version 1) to document the updates made in disaster impact reporting between the two releases. Key revisions include the addition of the 2024 European heatwave mortality estimate, which alone accounts for 62,557 deaths, and significant updates to economic loss figures for Hurricane Helene and seasonal floods in China. The archive also documents improvements in interoperability, with 1,504 new GLIDE identifiers, 878 HANZE linkages, and expanded USGS earthquake references, alongside the ongoing transition from GAUL 2015 to GADM 4.1 geocoding. These changes enhance the database’s spatial precision and facilitate federated use of complementary disaster catalogs. The 2024 EM-DAT Archive, released under a CC-BY-NC-ND license and validated with the EM-TEST framework, is publicly available via the UCLouvain Dataverse. It serves as a FAIR-compliant foundation for open and reproducible disaster research, supporting retrospective reassessment and methodological advancements in disaster data towards improved risk understanding and reduction.