For countries and communities to better manage disaster and climate risk, a key step is to understand and quantity that risk. Traditionally, the insurance industry has been at the forefront of producing disaster and climate risk data. In 2025 alone, natural hazards caused $224 billion in damages, according to the global reinsurance company Munich Re.
In the last decade, however, humanitarian and development organizations such as the World Bank have increasingly invested in disaster risk assessments, too. The data required for making these assessments can generally be divided into three categories: hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. To date, however, there has been no widely accepted approach for storing, sharing, and discovering such information. In practice, this situation has introduced a significant amount of friction in efforts to quantify and manage disaster risk.
Aware of the issue, a team at the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) has been coordinating research and development that led to the launch in 2023 of the Risk Data Library, which houses open source risk data and tools to manage this data. In addition, it also houses the Risk Data Library Standard (RDLS), an open data standard for describing disaster risk information such as hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and loss datasets used in climate and disaster risk assessments.
Recently, this work reached an important milestone with the Risk Data Library now referencing nearly 10,000 risk datasets, coming from various sources, including the World Bank’s data catalog, the Risk Data Hub (RDH) of the Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre (DRMKC) supported by the European Union, and the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) supported by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The sources also include GeoNode, among other various data sources, supported by GFDRR over the years.
All these datasets are now available in the same metadata format on the Risk Data Library, making it easier for users to search for, compare, and analyze risk data availability and gaps across locations. Target users of the Library include students and academics, risk modelers, policy analysts, and software developers working on risk data tools.
The Risk Data Library has been made possible with the support of a range of partners, including the Swiss Re Foundation. It is also supported by the Gates Foundation through its partnership with the City Resilience Program, housed at GFDRR.
