Kontur Event Feed (Global Natural Disaster List)

Disaster data arrives from many agencies, each with its own formats, standards, geometry and timeframes, so building an internal disaster alert system means months of integration work. Kontur Event Feed, marketed as the Global Natural Disaster List, collects, normalises, merges and enriches that information into one common data model. Kontur built it at the request of a major Western European reinsurance company, and names insurers, logistics providers, humanitarian organisations, researchers and public agencies among its users.

The feed delivers near-real-time and historical disaster events from sources including the Pacific Disaster Center (PDC), GDACS, EM-DAT, NASA FIRMS, CalFire, NIFC, NOAA, the National Hurricane Center and USGS. Its wildfire data includes NASA FIRMS active-fire detections from the MODIS and VIIRS satellite instruments. Reports of the same event from different sources are merged, and each event is broken into episodes that trace how the disaster develops. Perils covered include cyclones, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, volcanoes, droughts, tsunamis, storms, tornadoes and winter storms.

Each event is enriched with Kontur's own analytics, such as population, populated area, forest and industrial area within the event geometry. The commercial private feed adds more sources, advanced analytics and disaster loss estimation.

Buyers access the feed through a REST API with a GeoJSON endpoint, cursor-based pagination and the original source payloads. Alerts can also go out by webhook, Slack or email, with custom triggers on location, hazard metadata (such as wind speed or magnitude) and exposure analytics. A public version is free for any purpose, including commercial use; the commercial feed starts at $2,000 per month depending on configuration. Kontur quotes onboarding in 1–2 days and full integration in 2–3 weeks. The feed also supplies the event data for Kontur's Global Fires viewer, and a feed with 20 years of historical fire data is available on request.