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The EUCENTRE organized and hosted the European Building Exposure Workshop from 1st – 2nd March in Pavia as part of the Horizon 2020-funded SERA project, with the aim to review initial exposure models and their underlying assumptions for a number of countries in Europe.

The workshop brought together experts with knowledge on the residential, commercial and industrial buildings in Europe, or who had developed country-wide building inventories for public or private seismic risk applications. The 2-day workshop facilitated by Helen Crowley - EUCENTRE-SERA, produced the following:

- revised classification scheme that could be used for building types in Europe, insights into building practices and design codes from the participants’ respective countries,

- mapping schemes for the distribution of building types across each country (residential, commercial and industrial),

- identified assumptions on replacement costs and

- areas of buildings and list of available sources of data on buildings from the participants’ countries.

About 30 professional from various parts of Europe including GEM’s Vitor Silva - Seismic Risk Coordinator and Venetia Despotaki - Physical Risk Engineer participated in the workshop.

The 2-day event covered a wide range of topics including filling out a comprehensive online questionnaire on building classification; and presentations on: - GEM’s Risk modelling framework by Vitor Silva;- Development of residential and non-residential exposure models in SERA and- Explanation of SERA preliminary mapping schemes by Venetia Despotaki. Other participants presented insights into building stock in Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Iceland, and France.

The SERA project is collaborating closely with the GEM Foundation (Global Earthquake Model) to: develop a European Risk Modelling framework that brings together the strengths of previous projects such as SHARE, NERA and fills in the research gaps; integrate knowledge and data from other SERA working packages; and build on the risk assessment framework and software developed by GEM.