Global Vulnerability Estimation Methods

The project on 'Seismic Vulnerability Development Guidelines and Seismic Vulnerability Functions' is the largest-ever public effort to understand the seismic vulnerability of buildings around the world. The project focuses on relationships between earthquake shaking intensity and building damage or loss, relationships often called seismic vulnerability functions.

The project has two central objectives: to develop procedures for deriving vulnerability functions, and to actually implement those procedures and produce seismic vulnerability functions for a wide variety of building types.

The project will not produce seismic vulnerability functions for every building type everywhere in the world, but it will most likely provide a major advance, both in terms of a library of open source seismic vulnerability functions and standardized procedures for adding to that library. The project will address four distinct approaches to creating seismic vulnerability functions: empirical, analytical, expert opinion and empirical-national.

The work on these approaches is described on a dedicated page.

Consortium
The project is led by  the University of Colorado at Boulders and furthermore has as its partners the University of Chile, Geoscience Australia, EERI, Stanford University, University College London, University of Bath, USGS and Willis. How the various partners are involved in the activities is described in the background page.


Main deliverables

• A substantial database of global vulnerability functions
• Improvements to analytical & other methods
• Guidelines for creating new functions
• Guidelines for updating existing functions
• Tests of guidelines by internal investigators
• Dissemination to regional efforts

Planning
This 3-year project will focus its effort in year 1 on developing guidelines: how to create, document, & QA vulnerability functions; treat uncertainty; & update with new information.

Year 2 will be largely devoted to implementing those vulnerablity guidelines and creating global seismic vulnerability functions; in decreasing priority: empirical, analytical, expert opinion, empirical-national backup.

The activities in Year 3 will be focused on peer review and efforts to disseminate the products of the research to regional programmes and contacts around the world.  

• Outreach Meeting 2011