Sri Lanka is experiencing multiple natural disasters with severe impacts over the past years affecting human lives, disturbing human settlements and damaging properties. Therefore development of a hazard profile for the country has become an urgent and a timely need to minimize the impacts of development ensuring the sustainability of investments. It is essential to have a comprehensive document on such hazards for decision makers to use for short term and long term planning to minimize the impacts.

In order to fulfil this requirement, in 2009, Disaster Management Centre (DMC) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) initiated a hazard profiles development process in collaboration with the relevant technical agencies, which are responsible for disaster mitigation activities of the country. Hence, it was decided to develop nine hazard profiles of the country namely; CoastalErosion, Drought, Floods, Landslides, Lightning, Sea Level Rise, Storm Surge, Tropical Cyclone and Tsunami. This hazard profiles could be used basically for regional level planning for disaster reduction in Sri Lanka.