Assessing seismic hazard and risk globally for an earthquake resilient world

The constant growth of world population has led to growth in conurbations prone to disasters associated with natural hazards and - as a consequence - to an increase in the overall level of societal risk. Amongst natural catastrophes, earthquakes represent about one fifth of the economic losses, and are responsible for an average of 20 thousand fatalities per year. This increasing pressure requires the development and implementation of risk reduction measures, ideally supported by reliable and technically sound risk information, such as maps, with expected hazard intensities, annualised average losses, or losses for a particular return period (or probability of exceedance). Some of the challenges to the generation of this information are due to the lack of open models, datasets and tools, as well as insufficient local capacity to create or use such resources. The recognition of this shortage of models and need to improve institutional capacity to assess the impact of earthquakes propelled the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) and its partners to develop an open seismic hazard and risk model with global coverage.

In this contribution, the authors describe the hazard, exposure and vulnerability components of this model, and the open-source tools that have been created to allow experts to reproduce the hazard and risk results, or tailor parts of the model to specific needs. The report also provides a discussion regarding how the results from the global earthquake model may be used to identify global risk trends, and support the monitoring of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

This paper is a contribution to the 2019 edition of the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR 2019).

To cite this paper: 

Silva, V. et al. Assessing seismic hazard and risk globally for an earthquake resilient world. Contributing Paper to GAR 2019