Global Seismic Embodied Carbon Risk

The first global assessment of the carbon cost of earthquakes

Description

The v2026.1 Global Seismic Embodied-Carbon Risk Map shows the carbon footprint of earthquakes in terms of emissions from building damage due to ground shaking. The model combines seismic hazard, vulnerability, exposure and embodied carbon factors to estimate the average annual embodied carbon (AAEC) for residential, commercial and industrial buildings worldwide, corresponding to approximately 17 MtCO2e per year. AAEC is computed using the event-based calculator of the GEM OpenQuake Engine, which aggregates impacts from multiple earthquake scenarios into a long-term annualised metric.

The underlying global exposure model describes building stocks using data on construction material, structural system, occupancy, replacement cost and other relevant vulnerability attributes. A newly developed harmonised embodied-carbon database is used to assign replacement carbon values to exposed buildings worldwide, capturing regional differences in production systems and supply chains. Overall, the current global building stock embodies approximately 102 GtCO2e.

How to cite this work

Caruso M, Aljawhari K, Nafeh AMB, Calderón A, Rao A, Yepes-Estrada C, Silva V (2026). Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Seismic Embodied-Carbon Risk Map (version 2026.1), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20208633.

Available Versions

A PDF poster, as well as a high-resolution PNG of embodied carbon risk calculated globally, is available for direct download under a CC BY-SA license. If your use case does not meet the open license requirements, or if you are interested in obtaining the underlying dataset as a shapefile, please submit a request in our system by clicking on the "License Request", where a specific license will be provided, depending on the use case.

License information

The downloadable resources are available under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license, which requires:

Attribution (you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made)
ShareAlike (derivatives created must be made available under the same license as the original)

Any deviation from these terms incur in license infringement and requires a license agreement that must be made tailored to your use case, in such instance please click on "License Request".