GEM’s Gender Equality Plan reflects ongoing efforts to promote fairness, inclusivity, and equal opportunities across the organisation. The highlights below present key achievements and areas of focus in 2024, including gender pay equity, workforce balance, leadership opportunities, and support for work-life balance.

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)'s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2023 offers a unique perspective on development progress by emphasizing risk and resilience in a changing climate. The report features maps developed in collaboration with the GEM Foundation (Catarina Costa, Vitor Silva, and John Schneider) and other agencies (United Nations Geospatial Information Section, Environmental Systems Research Institute - ESRI), displaying country-level #SDG indicators and risk drivers, and showcasing resilience deficits. These maps also present future projections of these deficits under different climate scenarios, incorporating #ipcc greenhouse-gas-emission-rate scenarios and representative concentration pathways. The report serves as a comprehensive inter-agency effort to assess and address resilience gaps, aiding in informed decision-making for #sustainabledevelopment.

The physical, financial, and social impacts of disasters in Europe are growing and will continue to grow unless urgent actions are taken. In the European Union (EU), during the period from 1980 to 2020, natural disasters affected nearly 50 million people and caused on average an economic loss of roughly €12 billion per year (EEA, 2020). The impacts of flood, wildfire, and extreme heat are increasing rapidly, and climate damages could reach €170 billion per year according to conservative estimates for a 3 scenario unless urgent action is taken now (Szewczyk, et al., 2020). Earthquakes, while rare, have a devastating impact on the ageing buildings and infrastructure of Europe that were constructed prior to modern codes; in Bucharest, for example, nearly 90% of the population lives in multifamily buildings with pre-modern building codes3 (Simpson & Markhvida, 2020). Within the EU, the top-five countries with the highest annual average loss to earthquake are Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia, and for floods the top-five countries are Romania, Slovenia, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Austria.4 However, disasters do not affect everyone equally: poor, elderly, very young, and marginalized populations are most affected and least able to recover. In Romania, Greece, Croatia, and Bulgaria, for example, the socio-economic resilience of the poor is on average less than 30% of the national average (World Bank, 2020). Moreover, the local and regional administrations in the poorer and more disadvantaged areas have the least capacity to design and implement resilience investments.

El presente documento es el resultado del esfuerzo colaborativo entre la Fundación GEM, la administración del Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá (AMVA) y su proyecto Sistema de Alerta Temprana de Medellín y el Valle de Aburrá - SIATA y la Universidad EAFIT. El objetivo de este reporte es generar material didáctico para sensibilizar a la comunidad sobre el riesgo sísmico que pueda servir de apoyo a las personas encargadas de comunicar este tema a diferentes grupos de la sociedad. El público objetivo de la sesión va desde estudiantes en diferentes grados de escolaridad a la comunidad general, incluyendo al personal que participa en las actividades de planeación, reducción y mitigación del riesgo de desastres.

El presente documento es el resultado del esfuerzo colaborativo entre la Fundación GEM, el Servicio Geológico de los Estados Unidos, la oficina del Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial del Ayuntamiento de Santiago de los Caballeros y el Servicio Geológico Nacional. El objetivo de este reporte es presentar los resultados de la evaluación de riesgo urbano para el municipio de Santiago de los Caballeros, obtenidos dentro del contexto del Proyecto para la Comunicación y Formación en la Evaluación de Riesgos por Terremotos (TREQ), financiado por la Oficina de Ayuda Humanitaria de los Estados Unidos (BHA, por sus siglas en inglés).

El presente documento es el resultado del esfuerzo colaborativo entre la Fundación GEM, el Servicio Geológico de los Estados Unidos, la Secretaría de Gestión del Riesgo de Cali, el Servicio Geológico Colombiano y la Universidad EAFIT. El objetivo de este reporte es presentar los resultados de la evaluación de riesgo urbano para la ciudad de Santiago de Cali, obtenidos dentro del contexto del Proyecto para la Comunicación y Formación en la Evaluación de Riesgos por Terremotos (TREQ), financiado por la Oficina de Ayuda Humanitaria de los Estados Unidos (BHA, por sus siglas en inglés).

El presente documento es el resultado del esfuerzo colaborativo entre la Fundación GEM, el Servicio Geológico de los Estados Unidos, la Dirección Metropolitana de Gestión del Riesgo, la Oficina de la Alcaldía de Quito, la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, y la Empresa Pública Metropolitana de Agua Potable y Saneamiento de Quito. El objetivo de este reporte es presentar los resultados de la evaluación de riesgo urbano para el Distrito Metropolitano de Quito, obtenidos dentro del contexto del Proyecto para la Comunicación y Formación en la Evaluación de Riesgos por Terremotos (TREQ), financiado por la Oficina de Ayuda Humanitaria de los Estados Unidos (BHA, por sus siglas en inglés).

Earthquake-induced landslides and liquefaction are important secondary earthquake perils that can cause substantial damage to the built environment in addition to direct damage caused by seismic ground shaking. In spite of their impacts, they are not regularly included in probabilistic seismic hazard and risk analysis (PSHRA), in part because they have not been incorporated in most PSHRA frameworks such as GEM’s OpenQuake Engine. As part of the TREQ project, existing landslide and liquefaction models were implemented within the OpenQuake Engine, and have been made available for both probabilistic and deterministic (scenario) analyses. In this study we present the methodological approach we used to implement these models using the city of Cali as the case study. Regarding coseismic landslides, found that the probability of coseismic landslides within the city limits of Cali is extremely small, although it is likely higher in the adjacent mountain regions. For liquefaction analysis, we tested the models on seismic scenarios selected by the USGS through a hazard disaggregation process. The risk metrics obtained suggest that, in the case of liquefaction, the models make an appropriate prediction of the spatial distribution of damage and loss. However,in terms of the absolute number of damaged structures, estimates for both, landslide and liquefaction risk, are inconsistent with the level of damage and loss obtained from the ground shaking. Hence, we concluded that the existing methodologies do not perform satisfactorily in urban risk applications.

The objective of a selection based on hazard is to identify events with destructive potential based on their contribution to the seismic hazard. In turn such events can be modelled to inform the risk management offices about their potential impact and support in disaster preparedness.

This seismic risk component at urban level covers the development of uniform, open and transparent datasets for the urban building inventory (exposure model), the physical response of the infrastructure under seismic loads (vulnerability model), and the assessment of the impact from earthquakes, along with risk metrics required for the development of risk reduction plans.