Short answers, pulled from the story.
A natural disaster is the result of a natural hazard colliding with a vulnerable community rather than nature acting upon a passive human population. This definition shifts the blame from inevitable forces of the earth to human choices regarding architecture, land use, and resource management.
The Asia-Pacific region stands as the world's most disaster-prone area where a person is five times more likely to be hit by a natural disaster than someone living in any other region. As of 2019, countries like the Bahamas, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Armenia suffered the highest share of disability-adjusted life years lost due to these events.
The silent killers of the modern era are often slow-onset events like droughts and heat waves that develop over years and erode the resilience of communities. The 1997 to 2009 Millennium Drought in Australia led to a water supply crisis while the 2011 drought in Texas caused the Bastrop fires and severe economic losses.
Women and vulnerable populations are disproportionately affected by natural disasters due to social, political, and cultural contexts that leave them more exposed to harm. During the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, more women died than men, partly because fewer women knew how to swim, highlighting how social norms can become life-or-death barriers.
The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that 75,000 to 80,000 years ago, a supervolcanic eruption at what is now Lake Toba in Sumatra reduced the human population to 10,000 or even 1,000 breeding pairs. This event created a bottleneck in human evolution and killed three-quarters of all plant life in the northern hemisphere.