A database of disaster impacts in the Global South using Red Cross reports and Large Language Models

Damage from natural hazards exacts a heavy toll on society and is expected to increase under climate change. Yet, existing impact datasets remain limited and often biased toward Northern countries and monetary losses. To help address these gaps, we present ROUGE; a new socio-economic impact database obtained using textual operational reports from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). These reports are systematically collected and provide broad coverage of regions that are commonly underrepresented in existing sources. Using large language models, we extract qualitative and quantitative information on a wide range of non-monetary impacts at national and sub-national scales. The resulting dataset documents socio-economic impacts of natural hazards on the population and the built environment with a spatial detail reaching the subregional level, capturing impacts that are rarely included in conventional databases. This resource is designed to support research and applications that require geographically explicit information on socio-economic impacts of disasters, enabling more precise and inclusive analyses of socio-economic consequences of natural hazards across the world. Luca G. Severino and Laura Hasbini are both first authors and contributed equally to the work.