The number of people affected by disasters and the cost of responding is growing considerably (Guha-Sapir et al., 2014). There are trends in these numbers in that deaths from floods and storms are on the rise, possibly related to the consequences of climate change. In fact, seven out of the top 10 natural disasters by number of deaths in 2015 were weather related events such as floods and heat waves (UNISDR, 2016). These also tend to occur in densely populated regions, e.g. in Asia, where 71.8% of the worldwide disaster related deaths occurred in 2015 (UNISDR, 2016), so there are geographical shifts as well. Roughly, about 250 million people are affected by disasters every year (IFRC, 2016).