A chinese natrual key research and development project and its emergency response to major disasters around world in 2018

China is facing the increasing challenges from massive natural disasters at the background of the global warming, especially earthquake, typhoon, flood and drought, with serious casualties and losses. The Disaster Monitoring and Emergency Response Service (DIMERS), a Chinese national key R&D project, was kicked off in 2017, with the purpose to improve timely response service to manage natural disasters and crisis in emergency situations with products derived from Space-based, Air-based and the in-situ Earth observation.

Using this project, we monitored and evaluated the typical major natural disasters in 2018, analyzed the main impacts of natural disasters and their spatial and temporal distribution characteristics. The results showed that: (1) compare with the average level in the past three decades, the number of global disasters and its losses in 2018 had been reduced, and it was a low-risk year; (2) The spatiotemporal distribution of global major natural disasters in 2018 was unbalanced, and its impacts were closely related to geographical location, climatic conditions, and regional development level. We also tried to explore the response differences between developed countries and developing countries, and reveal how much regional capacity of disaster prevention and mitigation contributes to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) put forward by the UN, explain how should human beings defense and resist natural disaster risk well? Eventually, we reckoned that, in the face of growing climate challenges, human society had a long way to go to deal with major natural disasters.