European education on natural disasters – a textbook study

Abstract. Present is the role of formal education on natural disasters in Europe. To ensure a uniform overview, the study used secondary-school geography textbooks from the collection of textbooks at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, Germany. Altogether, more than 160 textbooks from 36 European countries were examined in order to investigate how much their content (pages, text, figures) is related to natural-disasters topics, and to find out which types of hazards are presented more often. In the research it was also analyzed which disaster events are frequently used as an example.