Showcasing the development of state-of-the art, user-intuitive tools for global earthquake risk assessment through community participation - that was what the 2010 edition of the GEM Outreach Meeting was about.
GEM’s annual outreach meeting was this year part of the Understanding Risk (UR) Forum, the first forum bringing together over 400 risk experts and companies undertaking risk assessments, with policy makers and senior officials from the Governments accountable for disaster reduction to share technologies and methodologies for disaster risk reduction, organized by the GFDRR (World Bank) in cooperation with the UN-ISDR and others.
Below find a brief report on the Outreach Meeting 2010, supported with photos.
- A 1-page summary of the meeting's outcomes can be downloaded below.
- Presentations can be downloaded from a separate page.
- Discussions are being continued on the GEM Forum and through the UR community site.
- Videos and more photos will be published soon.
1 JUNE
The UR Forum was kick-started on the evening of June 1st with inspiring talks and Ignite presentations of all the major sessions of the Understanding Risk Conference, which preceded the GEM Outreach Meeting.
GEM’s Secretary General Rui Pinho had the task to enthuse an audience of 400+ individuals for GEM in just 5 minutes. Fortunately he succeeded extremely well in doing this.
Watch the video of GEM's Ignite presentation.
3 JUNE
After the closing of the Understanding Risk conference, the GEM Outreach Meeting started on the afternoon of June 3rd, with the following sessions on the agenda:
- GEM Mission
- Private participant Perspective
- GEM Framework and status
- User Needs
- Regional Programmes
GEM’s Mission
“The principle of GEM is that, at the very least, everyone should be able to learn what his or her risk is. At the very least, we should be able to estimate that risk. That is what we owe the apartment dwellers and school children of the quake-prone regions of the world”.
Clear words spoken by the chair of GEM’s Scientific Board and one of the individuals that stood at the cradle of GEM, Ross Stein.
Private Participant Perspective
Anselm Smolka spoke on behalf of GEM’s private participants: What has been achieved within the first 15 months, in the pilot project GEM1 and under the GEM umbrella, is remarkable and unique, also what regards building up a truly global and interdisciplinary professional community.
Private participants are essential for GEM, both in terms of financial support and in terms of guidance. Two major points Smolka stressed were that..
- Private Participants explicitly support a focus on developing countries and emerging markets
- private participation guarantees for GEM ‘s tools and products to be of practical use, and not getting stuck in academic solutions
GEM Framework and Status
How does one go about constructing a truly global earthquake model? Rui Pinho made clear that ‘community’ is the key word here. GEM believes that a global model can only be built in cooperation with the community and be authoritative because the community thus believes in it. The GEM initiative is therefore structured as a public-private partnership and the development of the model is for most part carried out by the community on both a global and local scale. Hundreds of institutions and professionals in the relevant disciplines contribute data, software and carry out research. GEM’s partners ensure that user needs are being met. Collaborative and open-source software development and deployment of the most innovative technologies for construction of the model building and its user-interface.
User Needs
For an hour participants almost felt that they were watching a talkshow from their livingroom. Charles Scawthorn, who carried out a first GEM User Needs Assessment, and Brian Tucker, director of the NGO Geohazards International shared their views on who GEM should actually serve and how to do that best. Through the use of socio-economic agents? By starting to acknowledge that there will be users of the GEM tools and that there will consumers of the information produced by such tools? An hour was clearly too short to discuss this all, more to follow on the GEM forum therefore.
Regional Programmes
Only by engaging local scientists and professionals in GEM, will the model have a true global representation. By being involved in GEM development, the region will learn about the tools, technologies, the use of standards and methods and provide feedback. Linking independent bottom-up projects in all regions of the world to the model is therefore essential. Some of these regional programmes already exist and would have without GEM, some of these are specifically being developed within the GEM framework. Various regions presented their regional GEM programmes and discussions were held on funding, on the gap between risk assessment and mitigation and the mandate of the programmes.
4 JUNE
The next and at the same time last day of the meeting, had the following programme:
- GEM1
- Global Components
- Hazard Global Components
- Risk Global Components
- The Social and Economic Impact Module
- Calculating and communicating earthquake risk
- Collaborative Development of GEM
- Keynote closing
GEM1
The results of the GEM1 pilot project have exceeded expectations and now form a solid basis to build on. Project coordinator Domenico Giardini explains that within the set timeframe and budget, the GEM1 team managed to review existing risk software, collect PSHA 
input models covering almost the entire world, build a preliminary engine that is capable of global hazard and risk calculations and an IT architecture.
Global Components: For and from the community
Helen Crowley explained that the global components should provide the global framework for the model which will be reviewed by the Regional Programmes to ensure they are adequate for regional needs and characteristics. To ensure that the right work is being done and the work will be representative, GEM makes sure that the components are developed and checked by the community and that the work is being carried out by international consortia.
Global Components: Hazard
The work for the hazard module has been divided into five separate, but interrelated global components. Following the above descrive process, five consortia will carry out the work. Four of them described their plans for the next two years, in creating such databases or models that will cover the entire globe.
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Global Active Fault and Seismic Zone Database
Annemarie Christophersen explained about the creation of a single unified global faults and seismic zone database. Quite some issues were raised afterwards, such as: the criteria used to distinguish active and non-active faults, whether slip rate will be used as a parameter, what faults are considered most important, how uncertainties will be taken into account.
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Global Geodetic Strain Rate Model
Earthquakes release accumulated crustal strain, and therefore strain rate is a proxy for earthquake potential. The consortium working on this project will significantly improve the Geodetic Strain Rate Model of 2004. Questions were received for example on stress versus strain, on how the consortium will handle intra plate zones with low strain and few earthquakes and on how GPS technology might be used on blind faults.
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Global Ground Motion Prediction Equations
A presentation from Carola di Alessandro on behalf of the international consortium that will look into work on the development of a harmonized set of Ground Motion Prediction Equations on a global scale. She stressed the importance of cooperation with Regional Programmes. |
Global Instrumental Catalogue
This project foresees the development of a global harmonised catalogue of earthquakes for the last 110 years, and was presented by John Adams. Comments were raised on how other institutions could contribute to the project and whether it would be an idea to also analyse publications on earthquakes.
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The fifth component is the creation of a global historical earthquake catalogue, going back a 1000 years. The consortium could not be present at the meeting, but more information will soon be available and added to the page on Global Components.
Global Components: Risk
Robin Spence in his presentation on the risk global components: “When comparing GEM’s overarching aim with an image showing the damage level in Port au Prince we can get an idea of what a huge challenge is It is easy to be cynical, and say that “a computer model won't reduce people's chances of being killed or injured in an earthquake. What needs to be done is to fix houses and we already know that, and how to do it”. Of course this is true, but a model can be, needs to be, the basis of common understanding which leads to all individual action and political decision-making.” … “The GEM Risk Group, coming together for the first time last September, identified 5 products which it saw as essential to achieving GEM’s aims in the scope of the risk module. The tasks are both highly interdisciplinary and of global scope, so creating these products will be no small effort. They are also to an extent testable against the consequences of future events, in the way that a hazard map is not. So the Risk Requests for Proposals called for them to be tackled by strongly international teams, and gives them 3 years to do their work. And, because the 5 separate components interact with each other, close collaboration between the 5 teams will also be needed.”
Social and Economic Impact Module
The third module of GEM is about the impact earthquakes have, beyond direct loss and how this can be put into a comparative perspective. The module is not as far developed yet as the hazard and risk module, due to its complex nature and the fact that GEM started from almost zero. Rui Pinho and Leonardo Garrido explained the approach followed at present, which includes posting of the module’s basic document for public commenting within a few months. Some of the discussions after the presentation revolved around whether GEM should also take into account the impact on monuments / landmarks, the possible (political) sensitivity of the output and a focus on end-users needs.
Calculating and communicating earthquake risk
The session following the lunch consisted of 1,5 hour of interaction on the GEM risk engine; to show participants the preliminary tools that have been built to calculate, and at the same time communicate risk to different levels of users. The symbols demonstrated here were often used to indicate the collaborative and open-source approach GEM is taking in the development of the model, the global scale of calculations and communication and the type of tools and applications that are envisaged. In the session led by Helen Crowley, also Marco Pagani, Vitor Silva, Ben Wyss, Chris Holmes and Sebastian Benthall took part. Based on presentations of innovative technologies during the Understanding Risk conference, there were a lot of positive comments from the audience on the vision and ideas of GEM. Interesting points were raised as to how educate users on uncertainty, the difference between open-source and free and possible misuse of GEM software. Regarding the last point Chris Holmes (OpenGeo) said: "Software will be misused, also GEM software. I know that my software is being used in ways that I'd rather not have. But GEM wants software to be accessible; by creating a user-community you create a safetynet of users that check the software and check each other".
Collaborative development of GEM
A panel discussion with speakers of the Understanding Risk conference on how to work together, share developments and discoveries; what can be applied to GEM and how can GEM do something in return? 
On stage: Francis Ghesquiere (World Bank and organiser of the conference) Brett Horvath, John Crowley, Nigel Snoad (Crowdsourcing session), Omar Cardona (CAPRA session), Chris Holmes (Open Spatial Data session). The discussion revolves around the publication of data, the functioning of GEM as an 'action-knowledge-network' and credibility. Nigel Sno: "Create trust through the process, not through data (results). People should not be afraid to put not perfect’ data out there, as being non-transparent and waiting to put things out there might do much more harm for GEM's credibility".
Closing Address
David Applegate, Senior Science Advisor for Earthquake and Geological Hazards of the US Geological Survey closed the meeting with an inspiring speeach, in which among other things he said that “GEM has much to offer to the world and the US”, and that “we must use this model to reach the people and we must demonstrate that it will save lives”’.
