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2010 Outreach Meeting
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Over 250 seismic risk professionals and key stakeholders from over 50 different countries attended GEM’s 2010 Outreach Meeting at the World Bank in Washington DC from 3-4 June 2010. The meeting was part of Understanding Risk, the forum on innovation in disaster risk assessment. During the meeting, GEM collaborators showcased the development of state-of-art and user-driven tools for global seismic risk assessment through community participation. The many discussions held, provide relevant input for GEM’s way forward. Rui Pinho: “We received much appreciation for what GEM has been able to achieve in less than 16 months; during the meeting we were able to demonstrate that we can calculate and also communicate earthquake risk on a global scale. GEM must now endeavour to release as soon as possible its community platform that will allow users to start contributing to the application, testing and development of GEM tools, while at the same time the scientific community develops the standards and methods on hazard, exposure, vulnerability and socio-economic impact".
Do follow this link for a most informative summary of the Outreach Meeting, a video, a photo-report and the presentations held. More videos and photos are to follow soon.
Visit the Understanding Risk website, where presentations, videos and a survey will be released over the coming weeks. Join the disaster risk assessment community of 1700+ members and contribute to discussions and knowledge exchange on a variety of topics.
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Ross Stein during his presentation on GEM's Mission |
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Global Components
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Challenging presentations at the Outreach Meeting marked the start of the work of the international consortia developing the model’s hazard global components. The work they are doing is in many ways unprecedented and will involve discussions and close collaboration with the regional programmes and the model facility. For the first time uniform databases and catalogues on historical, instrumental and active faults data are being compiled on a global scale, as is a harmonised suite of "GMPEs". The integration of a significantly improved global geodetic strain rate model is also noteworthy. Follow the developments of the consortia online; dedicated web-pages will appear over the coming weeks.
GEM's Governing Board has reached a decision on the Risk Global Components submitted earlier this year by 17 international consortia, who are now being informed of the outcome of the peer review process that took place. Work is expected to start in the fall of 2010.
For what concerns the Socio-Economic Impact Global Component(s), the planned online release for public commentary of the roadmap draft has been postponed for a couple of months, in order to assimilate and incorporate the extensive input and feedback gained during the Outreach Meeting in the documents being drafted, which should now be published online in August 2010. Loss experts, social and economical scientists and others working on the topic will be invited to comment, so that a request for proposals may be released towards the end of 2010.
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| GEM Model Facility: the way forward |
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An IT review is taking place from 28-30 June at ETH in Zurich. A team of 17 external experts is reviewing the work carried out thus far by GEM’s IT team. Following two days of presentations and discussions, the reviewers will then provide the team with feedback and recommendations on topics such as the development of the computational engine, GEM’s IT architecture (the OpenGEM system), data sharing and spatial data infrastructure, the OpenGEM portal, etc. Technical experts from GEM’s sponsors are participating in the exercise. The next issue of the newsletter will feature a detailed report on the outcome of the meeting.
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