Disasters Out of the Box: A New Ballgame?

Findings of recent disaster research make mention of a changing disaster landscape. According to the disaster literature, there has been a general increase of the quantity of disasters per time frame during the last decades. On the other hand, several academics refer to a more important qualitative shift in the disaster landscape. Although this qualitative shift is very credible, there exists no academic study approving this evolution. If suchlike evolution is concrete, we will have to strengthen our emergency management in a substantial way in order to be better prepared for managing future disasters. After discussing the changing nature of disasters, we concentrate on a study of randomly selected disasters, using the Disaster and Complexity Diagram, a tool permitting to study qualitative trends in disaster evolution.