Global distribution of volcanism: Regional and country profiles

This background paper provides a resource for the relative analysis of volcanic hazard and risk around the world on the basis of regions and individual countries with volcanoes that have been active in the last 10,000 years.  Global information can mask the fact that there are great variations between countries with active volcanoes in terms of the number of volcanoes, knowledge about these volcanoes and their hazards, and current capacity to monitor them.

The publication provides profiles illustrating the distribution of volcanoes through the 19 volcanic regions of the world and for constituent countries, permitting national and regional analyses of volcanism. Country profiles enable the volcanic threat to be evaluated for each country independently. In many respects these profiles reconfigure existing information from diverse sources in a single place as a portrait of volcanic hazard and risk in each country. This publication identifies knowledge gaps and describes current monitoring arrangements.

This document is a background document of the 2015 Global Risk Assessment on Disaster Risk Reduction.