This tool asks two questions: which hazards fall hardest on the already-vulnerable, and where falling death tolls reflect real adaptation rather than better record-keeping.
Each line shows how a hazard's death rate changes as you move from the least to the most socially vulnerable places. A steep climb means the poor die far more often — a regressive hazard. A flat line means it kills more evenly.
Countries split at the median ND-GAIN vulnerability score; each line runs from the mean death rate of the less-vulnerable half to the more-vulnerable half (deaths per 100k, 2000–2020, log scale). Drought is sharply regressive. Heat and wildfire invert the pattern — partly real (wildfire kills in wealthy fire-prone regions) and, for heat, substantially a reporting artifact: high-income countries count heat deaths, most others don't. Means are outlier-sensitive — read as direction, not exact magnitude. Source: EM-DAT / CRED · ND-GAIN.
Death rates per hazard, smoothed across decades. Some have fallen sharply where warning systems and preparedness improved. Others haven't moved. Click a bending curve to see what happened there.
A bigger country isn't a deadlier one. Everything here is deaths per exposed population, so places are comparable.
Fewer deaths can mean real adaptation — or simply fewer, smaller events that decade. We separate the two before claiming progress.
Early records undercount, especially small events in poorer regions. Trends before the 1990s are read with caution.
Where we link a decline to a policy, it's cited evidence framed as a contributing factor — never a proven cause.
Pick a hazard, move through the years, and read the geography of loss directly. You've seen the patterns and the caveats — now dig where you like.
A country can stop its people dying in disasters and still spend decades rebuilding — and rebuilding output is not the same as rebuilding a foundation that holds next time. Three signals, read together, tell those apart.
Two things stay true everywhere on this page. Falling death tolls are a real achievement — but they count only who survived, not who was ruined: the same storm that now kills ten instead of thousands can still take the homes and harvests behind them. And every falling line here describes a past climate milder than the one ahead. We have become very good at keeping people alive through disasters — not nearly as good at keeping them from losing everything, and the threat is still growing.
The heaviest toll falls on those least able to withstand it.
Explore the data yourself →