Global disaster risk assessment from Emergency Events Database (2013–2023)

This study introduces an Accumulated-Event Risk Indicator (ARI) to identify global hotspots of recent major-event accumulation using 2013–2023 records from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). For each 5° × 5° latitude–longitude grid cell, ARI sums the country-level World Risk Index (WRI) values associated with events meeting a study-specific threshold of at least 50 reported fatalities, thereby combining recent major-event recurrence with contextual risk conditions. The baseline analysis identifies 153 grid cells with non-zero ARI values and 14 principal hotspots, located mainly in South and Southeast Asia and along the Himalayan belt. Diagnostic comparisons with a grid-level WRI-only reference, unweighted major-event count, and summed reported fatalities show that ARI produces a distinct upper-priority pattern. A temporally separated comparison indicates that major events recorded in Asia during 2024–2025 are concentrated in high-ARI sets at rates above the defined equal-grid benchmark. Sensitivity analyses further show that the principal hotspot geography is largely retained under the tested changes to the fatality threshold, grid resolution, and spatial allocation. The study also presents the 3H Dataset, an ARI-guided compilation of standardized high-resolution remote-sensing imagery assembled from open-data resources and supplementary acquisitions for the 14 hotspot cells. The dataset serves as a downstream observational resource for finer-scale analyses in data-scarce priority regions.