Assessing Integrated Earthquake Risk in OpenQuake with an Application to Mainland Portugal

Abstract

At the forefront of the risk assessment sciences is the development of standards, data, and tools for the assessment of earthquake risk. Countries such as Portugal have been targets of extensive earthquake risk assessments to communicate damage potential and to improve methodologies. Few studies, however, have gone beyond the estimation of direct physical impacts by integrating estimates of physical risk (i.e., human or economic losses) with quantified metrics of socioeconomic characteristics of populations. The purpose of this paper is to describe an end-to-end assessment of earthquake risk for mainland Portugal that accounts for physical and social attributes using the Global Earthquake Model's (GEM) suite of risk assessment tools. The results indicate that the potential adverse effects from earthquakes in Portugal are related to interacting conditions, some conditional on geography, some due to the characteristics of the building stock, and some having to do with the social characteristics of populations.

Dealing with earthquakes: the practice of seismic engineering ‘as if people mattered’

“…The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has granted financial support to develop earthquake risk models for Africa, South East Asia, Central America and the Caribbean. There has also been work in South America (Toquica et al 2017), Sub-Saharan Africa (Poggi et al 2017), Portugal (Burton and Silva 2016), Eastern USA (Schmidtlein et al 2011) and elsewhere. There are therefore clear signs of interest in the topic, but it remains to be seen how successful and influential this interesting and potentially ground-breaking part of GEM's work will turn out to be.…”

Using RISKPLAN for Earthquake Risk Assessment in Sichuan Province, China

“…The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [10] defines disaster risk as "the likelihood over a specified time period of severe alterations in the normal functioning of a community or a society due to hazardous physical events interacting with vulnerable social conditions, leading to widespread adverse human, material, economic, or environmental effects that require immediate emergency response to satisfy critical human needs and that may require external support for recovery." Based on this definition, though earthquake risk can be defined in many ways, earthquake risk assessment is basically decided by the combined interactions of three main factors: (i) the potential earthquake hazard at a given place, (ii) the people and property exposed to the threat, and (iii) the vulnerability of the exposed people and property to seismic hazard [11][12][13][14].…”

“…Therefore, previous studies provide necessary bases for earthquake risk assessment from the perspective of earthquake engineering. However, given serious exposure to earthquake disaster accompanied by rapid socio-economic development in China, there is a particular lack of an integrated and holistic evaluation of earthquake risk combining social-economic vulnerability with the physical impacts and loss of life [12,26,[30][31][32][33].…”

Seismic Vulnerability and Property Losses to the Portuguese Industrial Steel Building Stock

“…This increasing awareness has been recently strengthened by a Parliament Resolution on seismic risk reduction and new legislation on Critical Infrastructure Protection (Lopes et al, 2012). However, current existing seismic risk models are mainly based on the physical vulnerability of the existing residential building stock, integrating, or not, social vulnerability models (Burton and Silva, 2015). Still none has yet been developed incorporating any industrial vulnerability model, although some of the most vulnerable areas, such as the Lisbon and Tagus Valley region, are fairly industrialized and responsible for a great portion of the national GDP.…”