Informing humanitarians worldwide 24/7 — a service provided by UN OCHA

Topics pages evolve to include disaster types

** PLEASE NOTE some topic pages are not maintained anymore. See recent topic pages

Last month we launched the beta version of our new topics pages as mentioned in our previous blog post. We've had a great response from the Reliefweb user community and are pleased to learn that the content service based around thematic topics is both useful and relevant to your information needs. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the recent topics pages survey as well as everyone who provided valuable feedback through other channels.

One of the key pieces of feedback we received was that users requested similar theme based pages for disaster types. So today we are announcing our new ‘disaster type’ topics pages which are designed to let you research and monitor information about a particular disaster, for example floods, earthquakes, storms etc.

As with our previous initial topics page ‘Food and Nutrition’, we are initially trailing one disaster type topic, ‘Floods’, in order to gauge your feedback on this new concept.

The disaster type topics pages will be laid out in a similar format to the existing topics pages but with some new functionality. The first new feature is an interactive map that displays floods which have been covered by Reliefweb updates over the last 12 months. A red marker on the map signifies a current on-going situation.

In addition to the editors ‘Must Read’ picks we've incorporated some flood related videos from key humanitarian organisations, in response to the interest expressed by many survey respondents.

The focus of topics disaster type pages are to provide a platform where you can globally monitor and track specific disaster types, as well as access related global information and documentation in one simple location. The ‘Latest Alerts’ feature streams current notifications from the GDACs team. We have also provided links to monitoring tools regularly used by the humanitarian community.

As always we are keen to hear from you, so that we can continuously improve the site to meet the humanitarian community’s information needs. We have compiled a short survey on the ‘disaster type’ topic page concept. The results will help us further develop these pages to better deliver humanitarian information. You can access the survey by clicking on the popup box that appears when you visit the Floods page.

To visit the trial disaster type topic page 'Floods' click here

If you have any suggestions or ideas to make the ‘disaster type’ topics pages more informative, please let us know by either leaving a message at the ‘disaster type topic page’ thread on our feedback forum, leaving a comment below or contact us.