A significant evolution of the disaster landscape

Given recent disaster research, it seems that our planet has become a more dangerous place to live than ever before. Despite the rapid development of knowledge and technology, millions of people have been killed, seriously injured or materially afflicted by some kind of disaster during the last decades. According to researchers, disasters not only are increasing in number, a lot of them are also qualitatively different in such a way that academics often speak of "Disasters of the 21st Century". If such seeming evolution is real we will have to strengthen our emergency management abilities and capabilities in a substantial way in order to be better prepared for managing future disasters. In this paper, we first discuss the changing nature of hazards and disasters and focus on the characteristics of modern disasters as described in literature. Subsequently, we concentrate on the Disaster and Complexity Diagram, a tool permitting to study disasters from the perspective of impact and complexity in order to determine trends in their evolution over the years. Finally, we focus on a study of a set of randomly selected disasters using this tool and propose some points of interest in dealing with Disasters of the 21st Century.