Watching The World, 24/7
Global Incident Tracker exists to answer one question at any moment of any day: what is happening in the world right now? Not just the headline disasters — also the building collapse, the factory fire, the bus crash, the outbreak. We detect them, classify them, map them, count them and give each one a permanent record.
Twenty-four independent data streams
Relying on a single feed means missing most of the world. We combine twenty-four:
- USGS — the United States Geological Survey's real-time global earthquake network.
- EMSC — the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, adding denser coverage across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
- National seismic networks — BMKG (Indonesia), GeoNet (New Zealand) and INGV (Italy), which report local earthquakes that global feeds are too coarse to catch.
- GDACS — the United Nations' Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, covering floods, cyclones, volcanoes, droughts and wildfires with official Green/Orange/Red alert levels.
- NASA EONET — satellite-observed natural events, including wildfires and severe storms.
- NASA FIRMS — satellite thermal detection of active fires worldwide, clustered so that only genuinely large fires are recorded rather than every hotspot.
- WHO — Disease Outbreak News for epidemics and public health emergencies.
- WHO Africa and the European CDC — regional outbreak bulletins that the global WHO feed does not always carry.
- US National Weather Service — active severe-weather warnings including tornadoes, floods and heat.
- Meteoalarm — the official severe-weather warning network for 38 European countries, feeding in each national meteorological service.
- National weather services elsewhere — warnings from agencies such as the Pakistan Meteorological Department and the India Meteorological Department that publish Common Alerting Protocol feeds, read through the CAP Alert Hub. Only official, public, non-test alerts of moderate severity or higher are recorded.
- Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program — weekly volcanic activity reports.
- GloFAS river flood outlook — the European flood model read through Open-Meteo, which lets us say when a major river is forecast to run higher than it has at any point in the previous year. It is the one forecast among our sources, and every record built from it says so.
- US National Hurricane Center — the issuing authority for Atlantic and eastern Pacific tropical cyclones, giving every active storm's position, classification and wind speed as each advisory lands.
- USGS volcano alert levels — the current alert level for every US volcano that is not at normal, which complements the Smithsonian's weekly activity reports with the state right now.
- NOAA / Pacific Tsunami Warning Center — tsunami messages and warnings.
- NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center — geomagnetic storms and solar radiation events, which can disrupt power grids, aviation routes and satellite navigation.
- openFEMA — United States federal disaster declarations, the official record of which American events crossed the threshold into a federal response.
- GDELT — a global news-monitoring project scanning world media, which is how we catch explosions, collapses, crashes and other locally reported incidents.
- Our per-country news sweep — a rotating sweep of local media in local languages across 79 countries, described below.
- Our incident harvester — 34 of those countries, but asked six targeted questions each (buildings, fire and blasts, transport, casualties, disasters, health) in their own language, across two aggregators.
- National press feeds — over 40 major newspapers read directly from their own feeds: Dawn, The News and Express Tribune in Pakistan, Times of India and NDTV in India, Prothom Alo and The Daily Star in Bangladesh, Detik and Kompas in Indonesia, Punch and Vanguard in Nigeria, Hürriyet in Turkey, G1 in Brazil, VnExpress in Vietnam and more.
- Wikipedia Current Events — the community-maintained daily record of notable events, used as a cross-check.
- ReliefWeb (UN OCHA) — officially declared disasters, where an approved API identifier is in place.
- Public reports — incidents submitted through our report form and checked by a moderator before publication.
What covers what — and what has no feed at all
It is worth being direct about this, because most trackers are not. Natural hazards have official, structured, machine-readable feeds. Most human-scale incidents do not. No agency anywhere publishes a live API of building collapses, bus crashes or factory fires — that information exists only in news reporting. This is exactly why we built the local-language news sweep instead of stopping at the UN feeds.
22 of our 38 incident types have no official real-time feed anywhere in the world. The full per-type breakdown, with a CSV, is on what the world does not publish.
| Incident type | Where our data comes from |
|---|---|
| Air Crash | News only — GDELT · national press · Wikipedia |
| Avalanche | Meteoalarm · GDACS · news |
| Bridge Collapse | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Building Collapse | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press · Wikipedia · public reports |
| Chemical Spill | News only — GDELT · national press |
| Cold Wave | US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · news |
| Conflict | News only — GDELT · national press · Wikipedia |
| Cyber Attack | News only — GDELT · national press |
| Cyclone / Hurricane | GDACS · NOAA NHC · US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · NASA EONET |
| Drought | GDACS · NASA EONET · ReliefWeb · news |
| Drowning | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Earthquake | USGS · EMSC · BMKG · GeoNet · INGV · GDACS |
| Epidemic | WHO · WHO Africa · European CDC · news |
| Explosion | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Famine / Food Crisis | GDACS · ReliefWeb · news |
| Fire | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press · FIRMS (large outdoor only) |
| Flood | GDACS · NASA EONET · US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · news |
| Gas Leak | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Heat Wave | US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · news |
| Industrial Accident | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Landslide | GDACS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · news |
| Maritime Accident | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Mine Accident | News only — GDELT · national press |
| Nuclear / Radiological | News only — GDELT · national press |
| Power Outage | News only — GDELT · national press |
| Rail Accident | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Riot / Unrest | News only — GDELT · national press |
| Road Accident | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Shooting | News only — GDELT · national press |
| Stampede / Crowd Crush | News only — GDELT · our harvester · national press |
| Storm | GDACS · US NWS · Meteoalarm · national services (CAP) · NASA EONET |
| Terror Attack | News only — GDELT · national press · Wikipedia |
| Tornado | US NWS · Meteoalarm |
| Tsunami | NOAA / PTWC · GDACS |
| Volcanic Eruption | Smithsonian GVP · GDACS · NASA EONET |
| Wildfire | NASA FIRMS · NASA EONET · GDACS · Meteoalarm |
| Space Weather | NOAA SWPC |
| Other Incident | News only — GDELT · national press · public reports |
Because news is the only route for those categories, coverage follows media attention: an incident in a country with a busy local press is far more likely to be recorded than the same incident somewhere with little reporting. We reduce that bias by searching in local languages rather than only in English, but we cannot eliminate it, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Reading the world in its own languages
International feeds are excellent for earthquakes and cyclones and almost useless for a wall collapse in Faisalabad or a market fire in Lagos. Those incidents are reported first — often only — by local media, in the local language. So we built three layers to reach them.
1. The sweep. A rotating pass over 79 countries, asking each one a broad incident question in its own language.
2. The harvester. The 34 countries where most under-reported incidents happen, but asked six specific questions each — buildings, fire and blasts, transport, casualties, disasters, health — because a general query returns whatever is loudest, while a category query returns the category. Two aggregators are used, so an event missed by one can still be caught by the other.
3. The national press. Aggregators have thin indexes in some languages — Google News carries almost no Urdu at all, which we confirmed by testing. So we also read over 40 national newspapers straight from their own feeds, with no middleman, and run every headline they publish through our classifier.
That classifier reads Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Greek, Dutch and Swahili alongside English — nearly 900 keywords in total — because a Turkish newspaper writes "bina çöktü", not "building collapse".
Headlines are then geocoded against a built-in gazetteer of over 30,000 cities, drawn from GeoNames under a CC BY 4.0 licence — so a report about Faisalabad lands on Faisalabad rather than the middle of Pakistan.
That matching is deliberately conservative. Some city names are also ordinary words — there is a town called Police in Poland and one called Young in Uruguay — so a name is only accepted when it appears as a whole word, and a city outside the country the report came from is only accepted when it is large enough to be newsworthy on its own name. Testing this against live headlines cut false placements from 27 to 1 while tripling the number of incidents we can pin precisely.
One event, one record
When GDACS, GDELT and a local newspaper all report the same flood, that should be one record and not three. Every incoming item is fingerprinted by type, country, date and headline keywords; matches are merged, and the record's source count rises. More independent sources reporting the same event means higher confidence.
How an incident becomes a page
Each incoming event is de-duplicated against our archive, geo-located to city level where possible, matched to a country, classified into one of 38 categories using a keyword engine, and assigned a severity level from Minor to Extreme. It then appears on the live map and gets its own permanent report page with location, timestamp, source attribution, a plain-English explanation of that hazard type and specific safety guidance.
Severity is derived from the source signal: earthquake magnitude, official GDACS alert colour, or the number of independent media outlets reporting a news-derived incident. It is a monitoring signal, not an official assessment.
What we are — and what we're not
We are an aggregation and visualisation platform. We do not produce first-hand emergency information, we do not publish casualty figures unless an official source states them, and our data can include preliminary or unverified reports. In any emergency, follow the guidance of your local authorities and emergency services. See our disclaimer for the full position.
Coverage
Every country on Earth has its own live tracking page. Every incident category has its own tracker. Our History section documents the deadliest events ever recorded in detail, the statistics page keeps a live running count for this year, and the Today page shows the last 24 hours worldwide.
Open data
The records we compile are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — use them commercially or non-commercially, the only condition is a credit and a link. Our JSON endpoints are open and keyless: /api/incidents.php?format=list&days=1 and /api/stats.php. There is also an RSS feed (which accepts ?type= and ?country= filters). Upstream data keeps its own terms — the full breakdown is on our open data page.
Contact
Questions, corrections, data partnerships or press enquiries — reach us any time through the contact page, or email admin@globalincidenttracker.com directly. Corrections are welcome and acted on quickly.