Disaster

A disaster is a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts, which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources.

In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk. These risks are the product of a combination of both hazards and vulnerability. Hazards that strike in areas with low vulnerability will never become disasters, as is the case in uninhabited regions.

Developing countries suffer the greatest costs when a disaster hits – more than 95 percent of all deaths caused by hazards occur in developing countries, and losses due to natural hazards are 20 times greater (as a percentage of GDP) in developing countries than in industrialized countries.

Etymology

The word disaster is derived from Middle French désastre and that from Old Italian disastro, which in turn comes from the Ancient Greek pejorative prefix δυσ-, (dus-) "bad" and ἀστήρ (aster), "star". The root of the word disaster ("bad star" in Greek) comes from an astrological sense of a calamity blamed on the position of planets.

Disasters (journal)

Disasters is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell for the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). Disasters is managed by the Humanitarian Policy Group at the ODI. The journal was established in 1977 and covers aspects of disaster studies, policy and management. Disasters publishes field reports, case study articles and academic papers. It is currently edited by Sara Pantuliano (Overseas Development Institute), Helen Young (Tufts University), and John Twigg (University College London).

According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2011 impact factor of 0.692, ranking it 36th out of 54 journals in the category "Planning & Development".

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