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The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) in collaboration with the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom is supporting the development of an open data schema for hazard, exposure and vulnerability data. This initiative is part of the Challenge Fund program to further the understanding of disaster risk in developing countries through access to risk data.

The second round of the Challenge Fund focuses on three pilot projects that address the recommendations made in the recent GFDRR report Solving the Puzzle: Innovating to Reduce Risk - namely, to expand the effort to decrease disaster risk management costs and increase resilience by developing a framework that facilitates a multi-hazard view of risk. This effort is currently underway to develop the first set of open and internally consistent data on multiple hazards, exposure, and vulnerability.

This work began last April with a project inception workshop at GEM Headquarters in Pavia. The University College London (UCL) EPICentre and CatLin XL hosted the second workshop held on July 27 in London to collect feedback from a number of partners across the disaster risk reduction (DRR), insurance, academia and CAT modelling communities on the following: the prototype data schemas; approaches to rating different indicators and data sources; and best ways on how to communicate risk information to different stakeholders.

The GEM team, which leads Challenge Fund 2 on the development of a global exposure data framework, co­-facilitated the physical vulnerability characteristics and exposure taxonomy roundtable discussion, which focused on identifying the most important vulnerability characteristics; ways to account for uncertainties in exposure and vulnerability models; type of assets that should be supported by the vulnerability and exposure database; and the most common and useful intensity measure types.

Initial feedbackParticipants generally agreed that the vulnerability characteristics used to classify the building stock are well established, and that the GEM building taxonomy is a good starting point. For the most common or useful intensity measures to define the vulnerability functions for earthquakes, participants suggested ground shaking, landslides, liquefaction, ground failure and fire following.

Other workshop sessions covered multi­hazard characteristics, social vulnerability, vulnerability scoring system and data schema uses and challenges in scaling globally. The expert workshop report is currently being prepared and will be shared with the public soon. GFDRR/DFID Challenge Fund 2The Global Earthquake Model Foundation (GEM) leads the GFDRR/DFID Challenge Fund 2 which to develop a global open exposure data repository framework. GEM is joined in the consortium by ImageCat Inc. and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to develop an open exposure database for multi­hazard risk assessment.