Population growth and urbanization processes, trends in land use, increasing impoverishment of significant segments of the population, use of inappropriate technological systems in the construction of houses and basic infrastructure, and inappropriate organization systems, amongst others, are factors that have increased the vulnerability of the population vis-a-vis the wide diversity of physical and natural events.

However, lack of systematic, homogeneous, and compatible records of disaster typologies, understood as the effect of the occurrence of threatening events on the vulnerability of country, on the one hand, and insistence on considering disasters only as effects of events of huge proportions and high impact, on the other, have hidden the thousands of small and medium scale disasters that occur every year in country.

In this context, The Disaster Management Centre (DMC) of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights (M/DM&HR) with technical and financial support from the Disaster Risk Management (DRM) programme of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok (RCB) has initiated the development of a database on the past disaster incidents from 1974 to date.

The Disaster Information Management System is a sustainable arrangement within an institution for the systematic collection, documentation and analysis of data about losses caused by natural and man maid disasters.

The Disaster Information Management System is a tool that helps to analyze the disaster trends and their impacts in a systematic manner. With increased understanding of the disaster trends and their impacts, better prevention, mitigation and preparedness measures can be planned to reduce the impact of disasters on the communities.

The Disaster Information Management System(DesInventar methodology) includes a software product with two main components.

The DesInventar module is a relational and structural database through which the database is fed by filling in predefined fields (space and temporal data, types of events and causes, sources) and by both direct and indirect effects (deaths, houses, infrastructure, economic sectors).

The DesConsultar module allows access to the database by queries that may include relations among the diverse variables of effects, types of events, causes, sites, dates, etc. This module allows at the same time to represent those queries with tables, graphics and thematic maps.