Water-related disasters: A review and commentary

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of water-related disasters, look at the trends in water-related disasters, categorize water-related disasters in several dimensions, provide insights on the impacts of such disasters and discuss the predictability of disasters. Disasters may be succinctly defined as natural or human events, usually unexpected, that result in significant impacts in terms of a variety of metrics. Metrics for evaluating the impacts of disasters include economic damage, environmental damage, fatalities, reconstruction cost, aesthetic damage, disruption of normal activities, destruction of irreplaceable objects, and long-term or permanent loss of species. Disasters may be categorized in terms of causes (natural events, human induced, or a combination). Water-related disasters may be further categorized as floods, storms, waves, slides, droughts, epidemics, contamination and climate change. The temporal and spatial scale of water-related disasters vary by many orders of magnitude ranging from seconds to centuries and from a few square kilometers to the entire earth.