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Governing Board Meeting

GEM would like to thank all the sponsors and partners for making the first Governing Board meeting of 2019 a great success. Onward to GEM2030! The bi-annual meeting was attended by sponsors (Natural Resources Canada, FM Global, Italy Department of Civil Protection, Hannover Re, AIR Worldwide, ETH Zürich, National Society for Earthquake Technology - Nepal [NSET], British Geological Survey, Japan National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience [NIED], Eucentre Foundation, Geoscience Australia, Munich Re, Willis Towers Watson, Partner Re), Associates/Partners (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction [UNDRR], California Seismic Safety Commission [CSSC], Auburn University, US Geological Survey), and guests (Asian and Pacific Centre for the Development of Disaster Information Management [APDIM], Swiss Re).  

The GEM Governing Board will meet again in December this year.

GEM meetings with NTU-Singapore and NRCan-Canada

GEM partners from Nanyang Technological University-Singapore and Natural Resources Canada visited our headquarters in Pavia, Italy in June and met GEM hazard and risk team members to discuss earthquake hazard and risk in Southeast Asia and British Columbia, Canada respectively. The meetings also touched on GEM’s current and future activities and recent improvements on the OpenQuake engine.

Other notable participation of GEM in yearly meetings, workshops and conferences held from June-July on earthquake hazard, engineering, information technology and risk insurance are listed below:

• METEOR Project Meeting (Edinburg) - represented by Paul Henshaw, Director of Technology and Development, is a 3-year project where GEM is one of partners. It is funded by the UK Space Agency to develop innovative application of Earth Observation (EO) technologies to improve understanding of exposure of population, buildings and infrastructure to natural hazards, with a specific focus on the countries of Nepal and Tanzania.

• Impact Forecasting Conference and Aon Research Forum (London) - attended by John Schneider, Secretary General, is an annual event that seeks to present the latest technologies and grow understanding of catastrophe risk in the insurance sector.  John was invited to make an overview presentation on GEM’s hazard and risk modelling activities and to present some of the work GEM is doing with Impact Forecasting, and in collaboration with Natural Resources Canada, on the development of an earthquake hazard and risk model for Canada.  Based on this collaboration, Impact Forecasting/Aon plans to release an earthquake loss model for Canada on its Elements platform in the near future.

• Oasis Conference: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (London) - attended by Paul Henshaw, Director of Technology and Development, is an annual event for OASIS platform members to discuss interoperability of Cat models and risk modelling in general.

• 7th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering (Crete) - attended by Vitor Silva, Risk Team Coordinator, is an annual conference that brings together the scientific communities of Computational Mechanics, Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering in an effort to facilitate the exchange of ideas in topics of mutual interest and to serve as a platform for establishing links between research groups with complementary activities.

• 2nd International Conference on Natural Hazards and Infrastructure, Hazards as Earthquake, Floods and Harsh Weather (Chania) - attended by Catarina Costa of the Risk Team, is an annual gathering to find ways to enhance infrastructure resilience against natural hazards.

• Fault2SHA Workshop (Barcelona) - attended by Marco Pagani, Hazard Team Coordinator, is an annual workshop devoted to discussing complex-interacting earthquake fault systems, including discussion on available data (paleoseismological, geodetic, seismological, case histories) as well as on approaches for their modelling and integration into SHA.

• EuroPython Conference (Basel) - is the biggest annual event for Python users in Europe, the programming language used for OpenQuake. This year, GEM was represented by Michele Simionato, Senior OpenQuake Developer.