• Delhi
• Tibetan Community in Dharamsala
• Pakistan
• Tsunami

• Kathmandu (NSET)

• Central Asia
• Central Asia and Caucasus Region
• GESI
• Gujarat
• Quito Retrofit Schools
• Quito Risk Management
• RADIUS

As the world economy grows, urban areas are rapidly increasing in size, especially in developing nations. These cities are in a unique position to make decisions that can greatly affect their vulnerability to future risk from natural disasters. To implement successful development plans, cities must be able to assess their risk from natural disasters, predict future risk patterns with and without mitigation efforts, and track the long term success of efforts that have been undertaken. The Global Earthquake Safety Initiative (GESI) was developed to meet these needs, offering cities access to information that is necessary to begin the process of addressing urban earthquake safety.

The Initiative had four main objectives:

1. To develop a means to express urban earthquake risk in lay terms. It is critical that earthquake-threatened communities and their political leaders understand the nature of the risk they face. GESI synthesizes technical information about the effect of earthquakes into simple characterizations of the risk while identifying the most vulnerable aspects of the community.

2. To measure trends in the urban earthquake risk of the world's major cities. As people continue to move to cities and urban areas develop and expand, the risk of urban earthquake disaster increases considerably.

   Understanding the long-term growth patterns of a city is the first step in preparing mitigation plans. The second objective of this initiative was to measure how rapidly a developing city's risk of life loss due to earthquakes is increasing due to growth, or decreasing due to mitigation efforts.

3. To produce a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of various means of reducing earthquake casualties. The most important reason for cities to understand their risk from earthquakes is to enable them to work to reduce that risk. However, it is not always easy to know how to reduce risk most effectively. The third objective of this project was to produce a tool that can help cities evaluate which measures will have the most impact in saving lives.

4. To highlight the increasing earthquake risk of schools in developing countries and the potential for reducing that risk. The fourth objective of this project was to apply the tools described above to reduce the risk of seismic hazard to public schools. Schools are an important, yet vulnerable component of society, and they are a popular place for earthquake risk reduction activities to begin. Specifically, this initiative compared the risk of life loss of school children in cities around the world by broadly identifying which factors were likely to cause the most deaths in schools.