Short answers, pulled from the story.
A natural disaster is the very harmful impact on a society or community brought by a natural phenomenon or hazard, such as an earthquake, flood, tropical cyclone, or wildfire. It can cause loss of life, property damage, and economic damage. An adverse event only becomes a disaster when it strikes an area with a vulnerable population.
Scholars have argued since 1976 that natural disaster is a misnomer because disasters result from human action and inaction, not nature alone. Calling the impact natural misleads people into thinking the devastation is inevitable and out of human control. They recommend using the simpler term disaster while specifying the type of hazard.
A natural hazard is the threat of a natural event likely to have a negative impact, while a natural disaster is the harm that follows once that event significantly damages a community. FEMA illustrates this with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, where the earthquake was the hazard and the resulting devastation was the disaster.
The Asia-Pacific region is the world's most disaster-prone, where a person is five times more likely to be hit than someone elsewhere. Between 1995 and 2015 the greatest number of natural disasters occurred in America, China, and India. As of 2019, the Bahamas, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Armenia lost the highest share of disability-adjusted life years to disasters.
The total number of deaths from natural disasters has fallen by 75 percent over the last 100 years, due to development, preparedness, education, better methods, and aid from international organizations. Because the global population grew, deaths per capita dropped even further, to 6 percent of the original amount. Death rates remain highest in developing countries.
Women are often disproportionately affected because of the social, political, and cultural context of many places. In the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, more women than men died, partly because fewer women knew how to swim. After a disaster, disrupted enforcement, lax regulations, and displacement also raise women's risk of gender-based and sexual violence.
Natural disasters generate large amounts of waste quickly while waste management is disrupted, as when the 2011 Japan tsunami produced an estimated 5 million tonnes of debris. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, relief waste was called a second disaster, with over 700,000 tarpaulins and 100,000 tents required and blocked drains raising disease risk.