The initial version of the model was developed by scientists from the Council for Geoscience, South Africa and the Indian Institute of Technology, Jammu, India. The model is described by Midzi et al. (2019). The seismic source model was developed using a newly updated catalogue and consists of zones of distributed seismicity, while the ground motion logic tree consists of two existing ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs) derived for the active shallow crust. The model was originally created for the OpenQuake engine.

The latest openly available version is v2018.0.2. Since the original version, several updates were made to the model by the GEM hazard team, leading to the latest release (v2018.1.0), which was used in the computation of the 2023 Global Earthquake Hazard and Risk Maps. Among other important improvements, this model extends the minimum magnitude of events for crustal distributed seismicity and updates the GMPEs used for more recent ones.