The main accesspoint for the models and tools we are working on, the OpenGEM risk assessment platform is to meet the needs of a wide group of prospective users and beneficiaries and will need to include features that support the work of all those entities and individuals working and deciding on risk resilience and mitigation. It will allow for risk assessment at the community, national and international level and integration with many ongoing initiatives on disaster risk reduction.
We consider the following stakeholder groups to be able to benefit from OpenGEM, research output and related products and services that will come out of GEM:
Serving stakeholders; envisaged use
GEM’s model and platform are hence envisaged to support many types of users, both from private and public sectors, non governmental organisations, international bodies, but also individuals in earthquake prone areas. There are many possible applications of the model and below we provide a number of examples that demonstrate how different stakeholders might use OpenGEM, in some cases together with their own input data.
- A country’s Minister of Economy would like to find out how the average household income is affected by a possible earthquake, in the short, medium and long term.
- A civil protection department would like to see the expected distribution of damage and fatalities within an urban area for a selected scenario earthquake for emergency management planning.
- An international agency would like to compare relative earthquake risk for the areas they operate in (over 2 continents).
- A company would like to gain insight in the effect of possible earthquake scenarios on the gross domestic product (GDP) of the countries in which it has operations.
- A risk manager of a multinational would like to get a global overview of the risk of the various production sites of his/her company.
- An urban planner would like to calculate risk maps within a given region for a given building typology in order to identify the areas of a large city with higher levels of risk.
- A reinsurer or global primary insurer would like to calculate the average annual loss and probable maximum loss to a portfolio of buildings (based on their own input exposure data).
- A geophysicist would like to calculate the expected seismic motion on bedrock for a given location, in order to defi ne the reference motion needed for site effect analysis.
- A geologist would like to carry out a new tectonic analysis in proximity of a dam, and would like to download data on active faults as a starting point for his/her study.
- An engineer who is working on the design of a bridge located in a zone with seismic activity, would like to obtain uniform hazard spectra at different return periods for different performance limit states.
- A university researcher would like to access the OpenGEM platform as an expert user in order to produce his/her own PSHA input model using the Modeller’s Toolkit, and run hazard calculations with OpenQuake.
- An individual would like to understand how hazardous the area is, where (s)he is planning to buy a house.
Understanding prospective users
GEM is going through a continual user-needs assessment effort, to ensure that the model, the OpenGEM platform and the OpenQuake software will meet the needs of stakeholders worldwide. We are working to support both the needs of academics and others with profound expertise on hazard and risk estimation, and of those working in the fields of risk assessment and mitigation, or those with an interest in deepening their knowledge about earthquake risk.
- Scientists and others with experience in hazard/loss calculations are trial-using OpenQuake; the calculation software that will power the OpenGEM platform.
- The Nexus collaboration website allows all those that work on GEM to share their ideas and output of that work with each other and the wider community, and to jointly discuss the standards, tools and databases that will be integrated into the model.
- A project is being carried out in collaboration with an important NGO in the field, aimed at discovering the needs of non-expert users in developing and non-developing areas of the world.
