Natural hazards

Natural environmental hazards and disasters involve comparatively rare high-intensity processes and extreme events caused by both terrestrial and atmospheric processes. The study of natural hazards includes the consideration of identification of specific events, finding of their causative factors, assessment of their impacts on human and other biological communities, prediction of such events and finding their remedial measures. Natural hazards fall in two broad categories (1) planetary hazards and (2) extra-planetary hazards or extra-terrestrial natural hazards.

According to the report of the United Nations Disaster Relief Coordinator about 90 percent of all the reported natural hazards and disasters occur in the developing countries or in the Third World Countries. This observation may not be entirely true because natural disasters do not know any political or economic boundary and consideration. This observation may be because of the fact that most of the developing countries are located in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world where atmospheric processes very often cause numerous natural hazards and disaster such as floods, droughts, forest fire and of course volcanic eruptions and earthquakes wherein the last two are also more prevalent in other part of the world. Rapid rate of urbanization, industrial expansion, raising  agricultural development, population growth, and social development are continuously accelerating the frequency and magnitude of natural hazards and disasters in the developing countries. Developing countries more of less chronically suffers from disaster. In one sense they live with disaster. The achievements of development programmers' have often been destroyed and their future plants halted because funds had to be diverted to relief and recovery activities. It should be noted, however, that a signal disaster can strike a nation's social infrastructure, damaging its feedback system to an irrecoverable extent.