The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) is a public/private partnership initiated and approved by the Global Science Forum of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD-GSF). GEM aims to provide uniform, independent standards to calculate and communicate earthquake risk worldwide. With committed backing from academia, governments, and industry, GEM will contribute to improved modelling of earthquake risk worldwide. More information is available on the GEM website: www.globalquakemodel.org. As a first step in developing a global earthquake model, a focused pilot project named GEM1 was launched to generate GEM’s first products and develop GEM’s initial IT infrastructure. GEM1 formally started in January 2009 and ended on March 31st 2010, whilst ETH Zurich was appointed as the coordinator, with EUCENTRE (Italy), GFZ (Germany), NORSAR (Norway) and the USGS (USA) as contributing partners (and a number of other institutions and individuals, named in the companion reports, also provided models, data and feedback). The main objective of GEM1 was that it would provide a basis upon which the future development of the full GEM computing environment and product set could be built. The aim as spelled out in the GEM1 implementation plan was to largely use existing tools and datasets in hazard and risk, connected through a unified IT infrastructure. The GEM1 deliverables are therefore to be considered ‘proof-of-concept’ rather than final products, hence any resulting outputs should be conceived as conceptual only and are thus not suitable for application. This report briefly summarizes the achievements of GEM1.