Publications GEM1: OpenGEM System Design Document Share Facebook LinkedIn Download 2010 | Report The aim of this document is to provide an overview of the design of the OpenGEM system, within the scope of the GEM1 project. OpenGEM is the name that was chosen for the IT platform which will allow calculation and communication of earthquake risk on a global scale. One of the goals of the GEM1 project was to design an initial model building structure and this report hence describes the various components of the design. The IT infrastructure described in this report has been reviewed during an intensive IT-review after which a strategy has been determined for further development of GEMs IT architecture, which makes use of the work done during GEM1, but has taken a different approach.

You have chosen to request a demo on: South America Exposure First Name Last Name Email Company or Institution Name Country Sector Provide Details I accept the license terms and the conditions of products use. Email us at product@globalquakemodel.org if you're experiencing problems submitting this form or if you have any inquiries. Thank you. Request Thanks for submitting! You will be contacted as soon as possible Add answer here

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News GEM2018 Global Maps Launch Draws Worldwide Interest By: Oct 12, 2026 Dec 19, 2018 Share Facebook LinkedIn The launch of GEM's global earthquake hazard and risk maps on 5 December 2018 in Pavia, Italy, attracted international attention, reaching users in 156 countries, according to figures published on GEM's post-event feedback page. The page recorded 5,173 map downloads, 14,956 unique visits to the map pages, and 265 online referrals and media coverage mentions following the launch. These figures provide a historical snapshot of the international response to the release. Presented during the GEM2018 event, which brought together more than 130 delegates from public, private and academic organisations, the maps provided a global overview of seismic hazard and earthquake risk. The release also included an interactive map viewer, country risk profiles, and updated fault and vulnerability databases. Beyond the figures, the event feedback page featured reactions from stakeholders around the world, reflecting interest in the availability and potential applications of GEM's open earthquake hazard and risk information. The response marked an important milestone for GEM's efforts to make earthquake risk information more widely accessible and support its use in research, risk assessment and disaster risk reduction planning. No images found. GALLERY 1/0 VIDEO RELATED CONTENTS

News Call for proposals and paper abstracts: EERI and SSA annual meetings 2024 By: Sep 29, 2023 Share Facebook LinkedIn EERI Annual Meeting 2024 The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) is delighted to announce that the 2024 Annual Meeting will take place in Seattle, WA from April 9-12, 2024. The meeting theme is Uniting Earthquake Science and Engineering for a More Resilient Future. The main meeting, including a technical program with plenary, special, and poster sessions, the EERI awards ceremony, and the 2024 Seismic Design Competition Shaking Day, will take place on Wednesday, April 10th and Thursday, April 11th. Pre- and post-meeting activities will include a reconnaissance workshop and partner-hosted workshops on April 9 and a Seattle-focused reconnaissance field exercise hosted in coordination with the Washington Geological Survey on April 12. View the call for session proposals and paper abstracts (due October 17th) and register here today ! SSA 2024 Annual Meeting Join your colleagues next Spring in Anchorage, Alaska at the SSA 2024 Annual Meeting . Led by Co-chairs Carl Tape and Michael West, University of Alaska Fairbanks, the meeting will be a dynamic week of in-person collaboration, learning and networking. Session Proposal Deadline: 30 September, 5 p.m. Pacific. Shape the SSA Annual Meeting by submitting a session proposal. We are seeking session proposals from across the fields of geotechnical and earthquake engineering, earthquake science and seismology. SSA encourages all conveners to assemble a diverse group of co-conveners. Early-career members are encouraged to submit session proposals. Take the career-advancing leap and begin reaching out to collaborators today! A few key policies: Session proposals should include conveners from at least two institutions. Every session is required to have at least one non-U.S. government co-convener. Submissions require a session name, a short description of the session and the name, affiliation and contact information of at least two conveners. Find the full guidelines here . For questions about submitting your session proposal, please contact SSA at abstracts@seismosoc.org . No images found. GALLERY 1/0 VIDEO RELATED CONTENTS

You have chosen to request a demo on: India and surroundings Hazard First Name Last Name Email Company or Institution Name Country Sector Provide Details I accept the license terms and the conditions of products use. Email us at product@globalquakemodel.org if you're experiencing problems submitting this form or if you have any inquiries. Thank you. Request Thanks for submitting! You will be contacted as soon as possible Add answer here

News News Briefs: Meetings, Workshops and Conferences May-July 2019 By: Jul 31, 2019 Share Facebook LinkedIn Governing Board members with GEM Secretariat, June 2019 Governing Board Meeting GEM would like to thank all the sponsors and partners for making the first Governing Board meeting of 2019 a great success. Onward to GEM2030! The bi-annual meeting was attended by sponsors (Natural Resources Canada, FM Global, Italy Department of Civil Protection, Hannover Re, AIR Worldwide, ETH Zürich, National Society for Earthquake Technology - Nepal [NSET], British Geological Survey, Japan National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience [NIED], Eucentre Foundation, Geoscience Australia, Munich Re, Willis Towers Watson, Partner Re), Associates/Partners (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction [UNDRR], California Seismic Safety Commission [CSSC], Auburn University, US Geological Survey), and guests (Asian and Pacific Centre for the Development of Disaster Information Management [APDIM], Swiss Re). The GEM Governing Board will meet again in December this year. GEM meetings with NTU-Singapore and NRCan-Canada GEM partners from Nanyang Technological University-Singapore and Natural Resources Canada visited our headquarters in Pavia, Italy in June and met GEM hazard and risk team members to discuss earthquake hazard and risk in Southeast Asia and British Columbia, Canada respectively. The meetings also touched on GEM’s current and future activities and recent improvements on the OpenQuake engine. Other notable participation of GEM in yearly meetings, workshops and conferences held from June-July on earthquake hazard, engineering, information technology and risk insurance are listed below: METEOR Project Meeting (Edinburg) - represented by Paul Henshaw, Director of Technology and Development, is a 3-year project where GEM is one of partners. It is funded by the UK Space Agency to develop innovative application of Earth Observation (EO) technologies to improve understanding of exposure of population, buildings and infrastructure to natural hazards, with a specific focus on the countries of Nepal and Tanzania. Impact Forecasting Conference and Aon Research Forum (London) - attended by John Schneider, Secretary General, is an annual event that seeks to present the latest technologies and grow understanding of catastrophe risk in the insurance sector. John was invited to make an overview presentation on GEM’s hazard and risk modelling activities and to present some of the work GEM is doing with Impact Forecasting, and in collaboration with Natural Resources Canada, on the development of an earthquake hazard and risk model for Canada. Based on this collaboration, Impact Forecasting/Aon plans to release an earthquake loss model for Canada on its Elements platform in the near future. Oasis Conference: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (London) - attended by Paul Henshaw, Director of Technology and Development, is an annual event for OASIS platform members to discuss interoperability of Cat models and risk modelling in general. 7th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering (Crete) - attended by Vitor Silva, Risk Team Coordinator, is an annual conference that brings together the scientific communities of Computational Mechanics, Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering in an effort to facilitate the exchange of ideas in topics of mutual interest and to serve as a platform for establishing links between research groups with complementary activities. 2nd International Conference on Natural Hazards and Infrastructure, Hazards as Earthquake, Floods and Harsh Weather (Chania) - attended by Catarina Costa of the Risk Team, is an annual gathering to find ways to enhance infrastructure resilience against natural hazards. Fault2SHA Workshop (Barcelona) - attended by Marco Pagani, Hazard Team Coordinator, is an annual workshop devoted to discussing complex-interacting earthquake fault systems, including discussion on available data (paleoseismological, geodetic, seismological, case histories) as well as on approaches for their modelling and integration into SHA. EuroPython Conference (Basel) - is the biggest annual event for Python users in Europe, the programming language used for OpenQuake. This year, GEM was represented by Michele Simionato, Senior OpenQuake Developer. No images found. GALLERY 1/25 VIDEO RELATED CONTENTS

News GEM: helping reduce earthquake infrastructure damage through science #BuildToLast By: Oct 7, 2019 Share Facebook LinkedIn Earthquakes are the number one cause of fatalities due to natural hazards from 1998-2017 -- with the majority caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean and 2010 Haiti earthquakes -- and the number two cause in terms of economic losses, second only to storms. (CRED-UNISDR 2018) During that period, earthquakes caused more than half (56%) of the 1.3 million fatalities and cost USD 661 billion or 23% of the USD 2.9 trillion reported economic losses. (CRED-UNISDR 2018) Majority of the fatalities and injuries from earthquakes are due to building collapse attributed to poorly constructed buildings, lack of adherence to land-use zoning and building codes. The limited knowledge and understanding of citizens regarding the risks and mitigation measures around disasters could have also contributed to less demand for accountability. (Why Do People Die in Earthquakes? - Kenny, 2009) We cannot build a sustainable future with these monumental numbers. But as daunting as they might seem, they are not insurmountable and solutions are available. What can we do to address this? This year’s International Day for DRR theme is ‘Build to Last’, which is Target D of the Sendai Framework: to reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services. GEM believes that by better understanding earthquake risk, and developing the capacity of disaster risk reduction stakeholders, we can significantly reduce fatalities, injuries and economic losses from disaster damage through open risk data sharing; the use and promotion of transparent risk assessment tools; adherence to scientific methodologies; inclusiveness and participation; and putting the interest of the public to the fore. John Schneider, GEM Secretary General explains, “Earthquakes might be few and far in between, but when they strike the consequences are of epic proportions.” He adds that since 2009, GEM has been at the forefront of developing open analysis tools, global databases, models at various scales, and capacities of DRR scholars and practitioners to combat the damaging effects of earthquakes to human lives, infrastructure and economy. The importance of understanding seismic hazard The first global seismic hazard model was created within the Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program (GSHAP) at the end of the 1990's (Giardini et al., 1999). It represented a substantial improvement in our understanding of earthquake hazard globally and offered essential information for the design of buildings and land-use planning to many countries. (GAR, 2019) Almost twenty years later, GEM in collaboration with several organisations and projects released a new compilation of probabilistic seismic hazard models called the GEM earthquake hazard mosaic of earthquake hazard models created either at national or regional (i.e. continental) scale. (GAR, 2019) Marco Pagani, GEM Hazard Team Coordinator explains how GEM’s Global Earthquake Hazard model can be used to help improve resilience to earthquakes. “Many of the models contained in this collection are already used at national level to update building codes and compute risk at national level. Overall, this compilation of models provides a summary of the best science currently applied to the assessment of seismic hazard across the world at national and regional levels.” The importance of understanding seismic risk The calculation of earthquake risk requires a robust earthquake hazard model that defines where, how often and how severely earthquakes will strike in the future; an exposure model (building stock); and vulnerability and fragility functions (likelihood of damage to buildings). Vitor Silva, GEM Risk Team Coordinator says, "GEM’s Global Earthquake Risk model can be used to support decision-makers in the identification of regions that are prone to higher and more frequent earthquake-induced hazards and losses, to distinguish construction types that have high vulnerability, and to devise strategies for effective risk mitigation." To further complicate the problem, in terms of risk reduction, earthquakes pose a particular set of problems for countries in seismically active areas. ‘Return periods’ are long and unpredictable, so low mortality in the recent past is not an indicator of future earthquake risk. (Economic Losses, Poverty and Disasters 1998-2017 - CRED-UNISDR, 2018) A sustainable future This is the reason why risk-informed development planning in earthquake-prone areas cannot be overemphasized. The unpredictability of earthquakes combined with their damaging and deadly effects hinder sustainable development, creation of jobs and availability of funds for poverty reduction initiatives. Understanding risk is a prerequisite for a sustainable future. Mami Mizutori, UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction says, “If it’s not risk informed, it’s not sustainable; and if it’s not sustainable it has a human cost.” To help achieve this year’s DRR Day theme, GEM has compiled in the Related Content sidebar several links to GEM’s products useful for developing disaster risk reduction management strategies. No images found. GALLERY 1/8 #BuildToLast quote cards from UNDRR VIDEO RELATED CONTENTS #BuildToLast useful resources (links) For the general public Global Maps (Hazard, Risk and Exposure) Africa Maps (Hazard, Risk and Exposure) Country Risk Profiles For scientists, researchers and modelers OpenQuake (entire suite) - engine, platform, toolkits, user guides Africa Model (datasets) Glossary for GEM Taxonomy website Building Classification Survey website Publications GAR Global Earthquake Model paper/article Guidelines for Analytical Vulnerability Assessment Low/Mid Rise Guidelines for component-based analytical vulnerability assessment of buildings and non-structural elements Guidelines for empirical vulnerability assessment Introduction to GEM earthquake consequences database OpenQuake Platform (vulnerability, fragility, exposure databases)

Publications Probabilistic Seismic Risk Assessment for Costa Rica Share Facebook LinkedIn Download 2018 | Peer-reviewed This study presents a seismic vulnerability and risk assessment of the residential building stock in Costa Rica. It proposes a new exposure model using housing census data, public construction statistics, and private construction information to quantify and characterize the residential building portfolio. A complete vulnerability catalogue is established by developing fragility functions for the most common building classes and combining them with existing models derived for risk assessment in South America. An existing probabilistic seismic hazard model was implemented within the OpenQuake-engine, and complemented with a simplified site model to account for site effects. Earthquake risk assessment is achieved by means of a probabilistic event-based analysis, which allowed the estimation of several risk metrics. These include average annualized losses at a national scale, disaggregated per building class and administrative regions. The probable maximum losses and exceedance probability curves were generated using a stochastic event set with 100,000 years of events per logic tree branch.

News GEM Launches Enhanced Building Taxonomy Tools By: Jul 7, 2025 Jun 26, 2025 Share Facebook LinkedIn On 26 June, GEM unveiled its revamped Building Taxonomy tools, providing open-access scripts to support the classification of global building stocks as part of seismic risk analysis. The launch was presented during the Board meeting by Catalina Yepes, GEM’s Exposure Development Lead, and Matteo Nastasi, Senior Software Developer. The GEM Building Taxonomy establishes a consistent framework for describing buildings worldwide using 13 key attributes – such as structural system, construction material, building height, roof type and foundation. Originally published in 2013, Version 2.0 introduced these core attributes to ensure relevance, simplicity and extensibility. The latest Version 3.3, now available on the GitHub-hosted site, retains this foundational structure while incorporating improved data table and links to tools such as the taxonomy validator and explanator, available both via a User Interface and a Python package. The Building Taxonomy supports GEM’s mission to make risk modelling open, interoperable, and globally adoptable. It serves a wide audience – from engineers and planners to insurers and researchers – by providing a reliable framework to catalogue buildings consistently for exposure and vulnerability assessment. GEM encourages users to explore the tools, contribute images or examples to the glossary (which will soon be updated to Version 3.3), and join efforts to expand the taxonomy, ensuring the tool remains adaptable to emerging building types, hazards, and research needs. Visit the new features at: https://tools.openquake.org/taxonomy/ No images found. GALLERY building taxonomy 3.3.png CY MN taxonomy presentation.jpg IMG_0259.HEIC building taxonomy 3.3.png 1/5 VIDEO RELATED CONTENTS