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As well as disasters related to natural hazards, EM-DAT reports on the occurrence and impacts of technological disasters, which are categorized into three subgroups: industrial, transport, and miscellaneous accidents. Technological disasters accounted for 41% of EM-DAT entries (n = 5,390) between 2000 and 2021 and accounted for a total of 166,068 reported deaths. Of these records, information on the number of people affected is available for 63% of records, whilst only 1% of records contain information on economic losses. Accordingly, technological disasters affected 2,638,985 people in total and caused $63,178 million worth of losses (in US$ current value). In particular, three technological disasters accounted for the majority of the economic losses: the explosion at the port of Lebanon in 2020; the oil spill resulting from the Prestige tanker, that sank off Spain’s northwestern coast in 2002; and the explosion and oil spill on the Deepwater Horizon platform in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico.
There has been a considerable decrease in the occurrence of technological disasters, highlighted in issue 60 of the Cred Crunch. The newsletter at hand will look more closely at the spatial and temporal patterns of technological disaster over the last 20 years.