Lelo Nxumalo

In the world of risk modeling, natural disasters are notoriously difficult to quantify. While frequency is relatively predictable, economic impact is chaotic. A single "Black Swan" event—like the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami—can cause more economic damage in an afternoon than thousands of smaller events combined over a decade. I analyzed global disaster data from EM-DAT (2000-2025) to understand these patterns. Below, Wi look at the geography of these events and, crucially, how I am using a Composite Log-Normal Pareto model to estimate their economic costs when data is missing. The Geography of Risk To understand the scope, I first look at where these events occur. As the data shows, the distribution is far from uniform. Figure 1: Natural Disasters by Region. Asia is the undisputed global epicenter of natural disaster frequency, accounting for nearly double the event count o...