Strategy

GEM will build a global-owned model for the assessment of seismic risk on a global scale by 2013. Users across the globe will be accessing the model and accompanying tools through GEM's risk assessment platform (OpenGEM), allowing them not only to perform hazard, vulnerability, risk and socio-economic impact analyses, but also to collaborate and exchange data, results and opinions amongst each other. GEM’s strategy is to involve thousands of experts and practitioners in the design and development of the model and to develop the IT infrastructure in an open source environment, thus catering for synergies and collaborative development.

By 2013 GEM aims to have developed a suite of hazard, risk and socio-economic impact tools, methods and databases, which together make up the first version of the global earthquake (risk) model. Whilst this suite is aimed to constitute an already sound seismic risk estimation platform, it is also envisaged that it will be continuously evolving after 2013, and hence the model will be built in such a way that it can capture the world’s best understanding of data and likely behaviour of the earth and the built environment at any given moment in the future. In the years after 2013, GEM’s growing user-community will be able to add data, exchange knowledge on methods for data analysis and other issues, and will in that way contribute to the continuous improvement of the model.

GEM aims for the global earthquake risk model to cover the entire globe as uniformly as possible, and to use models that incorporate the latest logic-tree approaches and that permit parameter changes so that seismic hazard and risk can be explored under different assumptions. In five years time, however, it will not be possible to incorporate all the data effectively available, nor cover all the countries in the world in a uniform way. During its first Working Programme (2009-2013) GEM will hence create tools and standardised methods for obtaining and analysing data, and GEM collaborators/affiliated researchers will use these tools to begin the process of assembling the needed datasets, hereby producing data coverage for the world that is more uniform and complete than before.

It is believed and hoped however that by developing GEM in a collaborative way, involving hundreds of institutions and experts worldwide and by building a global platform that is flexible enough to incorporate new developments and datasets, other researchers, agencies, and institutions will adopt and enhance the tools GEM is developing, and will thus help in populating the datasets, developing applications for new stakeholder groups, and extending the model to include related hazards.