Casualty
Death or injury (mortality or morbidity) in disaster. Injury can be divided into physical trauma (e.g. fracture bones) and psychological trauma (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder).

Catastrophe:
A catastrophe is more cataclysmic than a disaster and affects a larger area. Jurisdictions affected by catastrophe are more thoroughly overwhelmed by it that they would be in the case of a mere disaster.

Civil defence:
The progenitor of civil protection. The system of measures, usually run by a government agency, to protect the civilian population in war time, to respond to disasters, and to prevent and mitigate the consequences of major emergencies in peacetime. The term ‘civil defence’ is now often referred to as emergency management.

Civil protection:
The process of protecting the general public, organizations, institutions, commerce and industry against disaster, by creating an operational structure for mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Military forces do not play a central role in civil protection, which is in the hands of administrative authorities, such as municipal, provincial, state or national governments.

Climatic change:
Change observed in the climate on a global, regional or sub-regional scale caused by natural processes and/or human activity. Climate change refers to a divergence in long-term trend rather than short-term variability.

Conditional probability :
The probability of an outcome, given the occurrence of some event. For example, given that a flood has reached the crest of an embankment dam, the probability of the dam failing is a conditional probability.

Consequence :
In relation to risk analysis, the outcome or result of an event expressed qualitatively or quantitatively, being a loss, injury, disadvantage or gain. There may be a range of possible outcomes associated with an event.

Consequence analysis :
Sometimes referred to as risk identification, the identification of elements at risk, their vulnerability and the type of impact or loss expected from a given hazard or hazards and dependent initially on hazard identification.

Control :
The direction of management and rescue activities in an emergency. Authority for control is specified in legislation and emergency plans. It is allied with the processes of directing and assigning tasks to emergency workers, and assuming responsibilities for failures. Many control functions affect multiple organizations.

Cost (of event, situation or activities) :
The negative impacts: these may be extend beyond damage and losses and may or not be quantifiable, both direct and indirect, including damage , time, labour, disruption, goodwill, political and intangible losses etc. Whereas losses refer to negative effects to existing resources, costs refer to adverse effects that go beyond existing use.

Cost-benefit-analysis :
Assessment and comparison of the costs and benefits associated with an activity or proposed activity. For example, a comparison of the costs of establishing slope stability measures compared to the accrued economic benefits of being able to occupy that place as a result of the achieved reduction of landslide risk.

Cost-effectiveness :
A measure of efficacy obtained by quantifying the costs and benefits of an activity and comparing them in cost-benfit-ratio. Cost-effectiveness does not necessarily require a predominance of benefits over costs, nor can all benefits always be quantified as readily as costs can.

Countermeasures :
All measures taken to counter and reduce a hazard or consequences of a hazard. They most commonly refer to engineering (structural) measures but can also include other non-structural measures and tools designed and employed to avoid or limit the adverse impact of natural hazards and related environmental and technological disasters.

Crisis :
In disaster, a point at which normal mechanisms for coping (personal, organization or institutional) suddenly cease to function as a result of the seriousness of the impact.

Cumulative distribution function (CDF) :
The integral of the probability density function calculated in the direction of increasing values of the random variable. Thus the probability that the random variable takes on values less than or equal to a particular value can be read from the CDF.

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