Worldwide collaboration Building on regional knowledge Regional Partnerships From 2009, three independent regional initiatives in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia collaborated with the GEM Foundation as part of the wider GEM effort. These initiatives are carried out in parallel with similar efforts at a global scale, and set the standard for development of datasets and models at a regional scale.
Network building, workshops and trainings In other regions, GEM activities have taken the form of facilitating scientific collaboration between local experts, making the first steps towards integrated regional hazard and risk modelling.
Africa
GEM funded workshops/meetings in Kenya, South Africa, Morocco and Tunisia which involved the participation of hundreds of local scientists as well as engineers. Facilitated by GEM hazard scientists, a group hazard experts from across sub-Saharan Africa is currently working together on seismic hazard harmonization. They put together a proposal for larger-scale collaboration in the region on seismic hazard and risk and are now looking for funding.
Caribbean and Central America
Caribbean experts started to work together with the GEM Foundation as early as July 2009 and several workshops and meetings have taken place since, the latest in Haiti spring 2013. Currently a bottom-up approach has been adopted; enlarging the network step-by-step, in order to build a lasting collaboration for hazard and risk assessment in the region. Together with the university of Madrid, GEM collaborators are working on increasing collaboration in the region within the scope of GEM, currently focusing on seismic hazard.
Asia and the Pacific
Meetings have taken place in Singapore, Taipei, Bangkok, Canberra, Dehli, Chennai, Kathmandu and Beijing, bringing together hundreds of local experts to foster integrated seismic risk modelling. Organised with partners in the region, GEM training workshops were given in Brisbane, Manila and Kathmandu. GEM is partnering with a seismic risk project in Gujarat, has taken part in the China-JapanKorea trilateral strategic cooperation programme, works with the ASEAN committee on Disaster Management and the secretariat of the Pacific Community.
Central Asia
EMCA > Cross-border assessment of seismic hazard and risk involving 6 countries in the region
Middle East
EMME > data development for and assessment of seismic hazard, exposure, physical vulnerability and risk in 9 countries of the region
Round table discussions on SocioEconomic Vulnerability and Resilience in South Asia, as part of a larger GEM regional workshop (Kathmandu, Nepal, March 2013)
City risk scenarios are integral part of EMME. In the photos meetings in Guhlsen-Karachi, Pakistan (top) and Irbid (Jordan). These exercises provide a unique opportunity to match the needs of policy makers with expert knowledge and resources of the (scientific) partners involved in EMME.
Europe
SHARE > seismic hazard harmonization across the continent SYNERGY > systemic seismic vulnerability and risk analysis of buildings, lifelines and infrastructures NERA > integration of key research on earthquake risk assessment and mitigation
OpenQuake Training organized by Geoscience Australia as part of a risk modeling course for Asian and Pacific experts (Brisbane, Australia, July 2012)
Integrated Risk Assessment South America In January 2013, GEM’s first directlymanaged regional project took off.
Worldwide collaboration Joint projects making a difference Socio-Economic Vulnerability and Integrated Risk One of the key messages that came out of the 2013 edition of UNISDR’s Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction is that we need to bridge the gap between the natural and social sciences, in order to really facilitate communities and societies in becoming more resilient to risk. GEM has taken that message at heart from the start, but from 2011 this got a more concrete shape when the socioeconomic vulnerability and integrated risk project took off.
The project aims to integrate open-source tools, spatially-enabled and open databases, and indicators and indices with GEM’s ongoing activities of hazard and physical risk to address the differential susceptibility of populations to impacts from damaging earthquake events Now, 1.5 years later, the first intermediate results are being delivered, in the form of socio-economic databases and use cases that demonstrate the context in which the methods, metrics and software developed as part of the project may be used for decisionmaking, validating and index development.
• The project aims to calculate hazard and risk, and to estimate the compounding social and economic factors that increase the physical damage and decrease the post-event capacities of populations to respond to and recover from damaging earthquake events in South America, by involving local experts from throughout the region. • The project also focuses on the risk to cities from selected scenarios, to acknowledge the importance that such studies have on the communication of risk. Lima and Quito have been selected for the city scenarios. • The project is being carried out with experts and institutions from the regions, who can build on what is being developed within the context of GEM: more uniform data sets and methodologies than have ever been attempted, using GEM’s new open source software, the OpenQuake Engine and other OpenQuake tools.
Seismic Hazard Earthquake Scenarios; Probabilistic Hazard
Geographic Context
Exposure; Physical Vulnerability
Social Fabric Place Specific; Context Specific
Economy
Infrastructure
Education
Estimates: Human & Economic Loss Potential
Social & Economic Vulnerability/ Resilience
Mapping Dimensional Drivers of Socio-Economic Vulnerability
Population
Physical Risk
Integrated (Place-Based) Risk
High - Moderate - Low
Health
Governance