A Proposal to Combine Different Disaster Impact Indicators into a Single Index and Its Application for Countries Supported by the WMO EW4All Initiative

Abstract In 2022, the United Nations launched the “Early Warnings for All” (EW4All) initiative, which aims to ensure that early warning systems are available to all inhabitants of the world by 2027. It is a response to the fact that climate-related disasters are increasing and many countries still do not have effective systems in place. For EW4All, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has selected 30 countries whose meteorological and hydrological services will be supported to strengthen their monitoring capacities for recurrent climate-related hazards in their country. This work aims to assess the impact of disasters in the period from January 2000 to November 2024 for the 30 EW4All countries using a composite scale representing a combination of different impact indicators. The unique feature of this work is that the different societal impacts are summarized in a single index. In this way, a comparative assessment of impacts between countries can be made, which can serve as a basis for action beyond that undertaken by the WMO and purely academic interest. This is a tool that can help decision makers to implement risk management measures. For this study, we selected the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) from the available global datasets because it is the only dataset with a time series long enough to fulfill the statistical criteria of this study and also uses a common disaster recording protocol for all countries.