HANZE database of historical wildfire and windstorm impacts in Europe, 1950-2025

This is an extension of the HANZE dataset to damaging wildfires and windstorms that have occurred in 42 European countries between 1950 and 2025. The data was collected by extensive data-collection from nearly 2000 sources ranging from news reports through government databases to scientific papers. The dataset includes 2259 wildfire and 1337 windstorm events characterized by at least one impact statistic: area inundated, fatalities, persons affected or economic loss. Economic losses are presented both in the original currencies and price levels as well as inflation and exchange-rate adjusted to 2025 value of the euro. The spatial footprint of affected areas is consistently recorded using more than 1400 subnational units corresponding, with minor exceptions, to the European Union’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), level 3, or International Territorial Levels (ITL), level 3 for the UK (for windstorms, also level 2). Daily start and end dates, information on causes of the event, notes on data quality issues or associated non-flood impacts, and full bibliography of each record supplement the dataset. Soon it will be possible to view, filter and visualize online: https://naturalhazards.eu. The dataset is designed to be complimentary to HANZE-Exposure, a high-resolution model of historical exposure changes (such as population and asset value), and be easily usable in statistical and spatial analyses. See also the flood dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23670886 The dataset contains the following files (CSV comma-delimited, UTF8, and ESRI shapefiles in zipped folders) HANZE flood events database HANZE_wildfire_events_v3_0.csv - Wildfire event data HANZE_wildfire_references_v3_0.csv - List of all references used in wildfire events HANZE_wildfire_regions_v3_0_2024.zip - Wildfire event data as GIS file (level 3 regions v2024) HANZE_windstorm_events_v3_0.csv - Windstorm event data HANZE_windstorm_references_v3_0.csv - List of all references used in windstorm events HANZE_windstorm_regions_v3_0_2024.zip - Windstorm event data as GIS file (level 2 regions v2024) Supplementary data S1_countries_codes_and_names.csv - Country codes/names S2_regions_codes_and_names_v2024.csv - Region codes/names, v2024 S3_list_of_all_currencies_by_country.csv - Data on all currencies used in the study area since 1870 S4_currency_conversion_rates.csv - Conversion rates applied to compute losses in 2025 euros S5_GDP_deflators_by_country.csv - Gross domestic product deflator by country, 1870-2025 Regions_level_2_and_3_v2024_simplified.zip - Map of subnational regions used in the database, v2024