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The Disaster Cost Network intends to :

* centralize data sources on disaster costs,
* promote cooperative work, for example co-authored papers,
* share research interests,
* possibly edit a book basically formed of existing unpublished contributions,
* provide a space for exchanges around papers, news, books, etc...

"On average about 220 natural catastrophes, 70 technological disasters and 3 new armed conflicts occur each year. Calamity is thus a recurrent feature of human life. Bearing in mind that the temporal distribution of extreme events of all kinds tends to be irregular, at the world scale, an "average" day would see 2 or 3 disasters in their emergency phases, 15-20 in their recovery periods, and about a dozen conflict-based emergencies in progress. Catastrophe is exceptional for the people involved, but at a gender scale it is almost run-of-the-mill, even more so given the recurrent spatial patterns that characterize it. Even at the local scale, extreme events can be routine." (David Alexander in What is a disaster? New answers to old questions, E.L. Quarantelli, 2003)