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adverse impacts of earthquake events. The latter will begin by focusing on
the implementation of methods, metrics and tools for the holistic evaluation
of seismic risk that will make use of composite indexing to allow for the
comparison of overall risk as defi ned by the seismic hazard, exposure, and
the physical and socio-economic vulnerability and resilience of populations.
The project will result in indices and tools for use at various geographic
scales. The following indices are being developed:
•
A social vulnerability index and database to defi ne the susceptibility of
populations to adverse impacts and loss.
•
A disaster resilience index and database to gauge the ability of popula-
tions to respond to and recover from damaging events.
•
An indirect loss index and database implemented as a measure of indi-
rect economic loss vulnerability.
The following tools are also being developed:
• An indicator toolbox for user interaction with the indicator data.
• An integrated risk assessment toolkit for the direct comparison of
overall earthquake risk.
While the term earthquake risk often refers to the probability and severity
of physical earthquake impacts (Davidson, 1997), the integrated suite of
tools developed for this project will allow one to consider the context in
which seismic disasters occur by coupling the physical impacts and losses
from an earthquake event with the socio-economic circumstances inherent
at a given place. This provides several benefi ts. First, the development of an
integrated approach for measuring risk will allow for direct comparison of
seismic risk holistically. Second, it will be possible for users to explore how
each factor that contributes to overall risk varies throughout space and
time. Here, it is feasible to determine the relative contribution of different
factors to overall risk to increase the user's awareness of the range of com-
ponents upon which earthquake disaster risk depends. An additional benefi t
is the applicability of integrated risk assessments for use in benchmarking
exercises. By re-evaluating the benchmarks periodically, trends in earth-
quake disaster risk can be monitored over time. This feature supports
measuring the effectiveness of risk reduction strategies.
30.3 OpenQuake
As mentioned previously, GEM has set up a Model Facility (MF) whose
mandate is to undertake the development of the OpenQuake platform that
will integrate hazard and risk assessment tools and data and provide these
to the community, and to enable and support all modelling developments
related to the mission of GEM.
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