Our Mission

“The GEM Foundation has set itself out to engage a global community in the design, development and deployment of state-of-the-art models and tools for earthquake risk assessment worldwide.”

Over half a million people died in the last decade due to earthquakes, most of these in the developing world, where risk is increasing due to rapid population growth and urbanisation. Recent earthquakes (Haiti, Japan, New Zealand) painfully reminded the world of the destructive impact of seismic events and the importance of the availability of reliable earthquake risk information. In many earthquake-prone regions no risk models exist to provide such information, and even where models do exist, they are often inaccessible, due to their proprietary nature or complex user-interface. Also there are no agreed global standards for risk assessment, which are critical for effective and unambiguous communication of seismic risk and essential as input for increasing risk awareness and the undertaking of mitigating action.

OECD’s Global Science Forum created the opportunity for an initiative to leverage (scientific) knowledge on earthquake risk for the benefit of society, worldwide. A group of people pushed the idea for a Global Earthquake Model forward, and in January 2009 the GEM Foundation started with its activities as part of a five-year build-up plan to develop uniform standards, open software and tools for worldwide earthquake risk assessment.

A lasting impact on seismic risk assessment
At the core of the initiative was the idea to create a state-of-the-art model that could be used worldwide and a web-based platform to access that model that would incorporate the latest technology, as to serve many types of users in their needs to assess earthquake risk.. from individual entrepreneurs in Portugal to academics in India and local governmental agencies in Peru.

The only way to achieve that was by making sure the core components of the model would be developed by the international scientific and technical community, and that what was being developed would be open and owned by those collaborating on it.

Currently hundreds of organisations and individuals on global and local scales are working together on the OpenGEM Platform, which will provide stakeholders access to global uniform databases standardized methods and models in order to calculate hazard and risk, view maps and plots, analyse those and use decision-making support tools to explore what can be done to mitigate the risk.

OpenGEM will be dynamic, modular and flexible, as to support maximum usability and to allow it to be continuously improved and enhanced by its prospective users and through which process having a lasting impact on seismic risk assessment becomes a reality.

Read more on WHAT WE DO and on how you can COLLABORATE in the dedicated sections.