August 2009 Issue

The past eight weeks saw a continuation of the sustained outreach effort initiated with the global meeting in Munich, involving, amongst other activities, the delivery of formal GEM presentations at a number of events, some of which are listed below:

- International Conference on Open Risk Analysis, Cambridge, UK, 12-13 June 2009
- National Geophysical Data Center Seminar, Boulder, Colorado, 24 June 2009
- NCAC of Zurich Financial Services Seminar, Boulder, Colorado, 25 June 2009
- International Workshop on Performance-based Earthquake Engineering, Capri, Italy, 2-4 July 2009
- International Conference on the 100th Anniversary of the Lambesc Earthquake, France 6-8 July 2009
- WRN Global Clients Meeting, London, UK, 8-9 July 2009
- IDRC International Disaster and Risk Conference, Chengdu, China, 13-15 July 2009
- Annual WRN Bermuda Seminar, Bermuda 21-22 July 2009
- Disaster Risk Management Workshop, NASA Ames, California, 4-5 August 2009
- PEER Seminar, Berkeley, California, 6 August 2009

The above does not include less formal presentations that have been carried out also within the framework of increasing the general awareness with regard to GEM, and consequently its number of believers and supporters. A number of additional GEM outreach presentations are already programmed for the upcoming weeks, as gathered from the GEM Calendar included at the bottom of this newsletter.

GEM's structure and organisation envisages the existence of an independent Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) that reviews specific details of the project, as a function of its needs over the 5 years. The first operative TAP subgroup to have been formed was the GEM1 Model Advisory Group (MAG) that will advise the GEM1 team on all issues related to the creation of GEM1. This assesment of the ongoing efforts in hazard, risk and IT will not only be critical to successfully complete GEM1, but it will also be an important input to the GEM Governing Board for deciding on the future direction of GEM IT and model building.

GEM has contacted 10 leading hazard and risk experts from around the globe to serve on the MAG; the first MAG meeting is now scheduled to November 2-5 2009 in Zurich. A second meeting of the MAG will take place in mid April 2010, right after the completion of the GEM1 efforts scheduled for March 31. The GEM1 team will prepare for this review during an upcoming mid-project workshop hosted by the GEM Secretariat in Pavia on September 8 & 9.

More news on the developments in the GEM1 project can be found on the recently released GEM1 news page.

In the past few weeks the European and Middle-East Region programmes SHARE and EMME have launched their websites and continue to work hard on the advancement of their activities, essential for GEM, not only in ensuring the adoption of uniform standards, but also in providing regional feedback and data to GEM global databases and components.

Progress is also being made in other regions, such as Asia, Africa and Latin America, where momentum is slowly but steadily being gained towards the deployment of their own regional programmes:
- a first Africa GEM workshop was hosted by Aon Benfield Natural Hazard Centre at the University of Pretoria on 3 August 2009, with a view to prepare a larger event that will be taking place at the start of October and where hopefully a regional programme for the region will be first drafted.
- a South Asia GEM focused meeting will be taking place in Delhi, on September 21-22, where India representatives from the scientific and industry communities will come together to further discuss and agree on a relatively definitive and operative collective plan for the region. The meeting will be hosted by RMSI, who kindly agreed to collaborate with GEM on this initiative.
- a South-East Asia gathering is scheduled for September 7-8 at NTU Singapore, with a view to trigger the drafting of a white paper on the collective and collaborative regional effort that would then feed into GEM.
- GEM is working with the Disaster Risk Management team of the World Bank, with CERESIS, and the USGS on the definition of a programme in the region of Latin America.

EMME and SHARE in their own words:

EMME (The Earthquake Model of the Middle East Region, www.emme-gem.org) aims at the assessment of earthquake hazard, the associated risk in terms of structural damages, casualties and economic losses and also at the evaluation of the effects of relevant mitigation measures in the Middle East region in concert with the aims and tools of GEM. EMME will be jointly directed by Domenico Giardini, SED/ETH Zurich, and by Mustafa Erdik, KOERI Istanbul. Main institutions involved in the early phase are, ETHZ (Switzerland), KOERI, METU, SAU (Turkey), IIEES (Iran), CUT, METU/NCC (Cyprus), YU (Jordan), NDMA, PIDE (Pakistan), AUB (Lebanon), AECS (Syria), IIT (India), ACNET (Georgia), ANAS (Azerbaijan), SCI (Armenia). 

SHARE is the programme for harmonized hazard assessment in Europe (www.share-eu.org). SHARE scientists are currently focusing on the assessment and harmonization of available data to build common data bases at the computational infrastructure hosted at ETH Zurich. A suite of meetings has been scheduled for the collection and harmonization of data as well as the selection of ground motion prediction models (GMPEs) as announced on the project website. A preselection of GMPEs has been proposed internally covering different tectonic regimes adequately. Activities are closely coordinated between workpackage and task leaders to ensure compatability of data with the targets of the project. The computational infrastructure is installed and currently targeting simple end-to-end test runs of the seismic hazard assessment software. Strategies for the SHARE web-portal are defined and initial implementations are in progress.

Nine proposals have been submitted in response to GEM's first round of Request for Proposals (RfPs) regarding the Hazard Global Components. These nine proposals are currently being subjected to an international peer-review process, the outcome of which will then be duly accounted for by the Scientific and Governing Boards; the latter is expected to take a decision on final selection by mid-Autumn, so that the projects may then initiate on January 2010.

As pre-announced in the previous issue of this Newsletter, a Risk Focus Group meeting will be taking place in Cambridge on September 14-15, with a view to prepare the agenda for the dedicated large international risk workshop scheduled for later in the year, in Pavia, where the final decision on the first set of Risk RFPs is expected.

The envisaged OECD-hosted brainstorming meeting on Socio-Economic Impact has now been scheduled to September 16, featuring the participation of representatives from OECD, Worldbank, GEM Scientific and Governing Board, Private Sponsors, United Nations University, etc. The agenda foresees a thorough discussion on current development needs in terms of SEI tools and data, together with the planning of the larger Workshop to take place at the end of 2009-beginning of 2010.

The GEM Business Plan will be available for download from our website by mid September. It will provide a thorough insight into the goals and unique features of the GEM initiative, plus information on how the building of the first global earthquake risk model has been structured and organised. The Business Plan is likely to be of particular interest for all those public and private entities that are interested in becoming a partner in GEM.

The GEM Secretariat will be mail posting hard-copies of the Business Plan to its existing contacts database. Anyone interested in receiving a number of copies to promote the GEM initiative in his/her country or region, should contact Nicole Keller.

To facilitate interaction with various types of GEM stakeholders, in order to be transparent, and to encourage debate on GEM topics, an interactive page has been created. The latter features a bulletin board, links to other GEM-related pages and a discussion forum.

We obviously invite all of you to register at the GEM website, so that you may then interact, leave comments and initiate discussions. Curious? Take a look at  GEM Interactive or go to the website and create an account straight away.