Discovering GEM's Beneficiaries' Needs
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Global Earthquake Model
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THE PROBLEM:
More than half a million people died in the last decade due to earthquakes, with most of these deaths occurring in developing countries. While there is no single solution to avoiding catastrophic losses in the future, one glaring problem is the lack of reliable earthquake risk information in many regions of the world.¹ Even when risk models do exist, they are often inaccessible due to their proprietary nature or complex user-interfaces. Yet, providing risk information to people in seismically active areas is critical for community leaders to make smart decisions about the policies and practices they should pursue to build communities that are safer and more resilient from earthquakes.
The Pavia, Italy-based Global Earthquake Model (GEM) is an initiative to calculate earthquake risk worldwide and to make this information available to anyone with an Internet connection through an open, web-based platform. GEM, which is funded by national governments, private corporations and foundations, wants to develop software tools that help increase earthquake risk awareness and that promote mitigating activities, such as retrofitting programs or the adoption of seismic building codes.
GEM hopes that many of the future “beneficiaries” of its tools are community leaders, such as local government officials, who might not have deep technical knowledge in earthquake science or engineering but who, because of their leadership positions, can advocate for risk reduction policies and practices. But in order to create effective tools for these community leaders, GEM has to better understand what information non-experts need when working to make their cities more resilient from earthquakes.
GHI's Response
GeoHazards International (GHI) is leading an 18-month project to investigate the needs of selected groups of potential GEM beneficiaries in developing countries and to describe how GEM could most effectively communicate its earthquake risk information to them to promote mitigating action. The GHI project team will travel to 10 cities in seven countries (Bhutan, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Peru, Turkey, and the United States) to interview more than 100 government officials, school and hospital administrators, business leaders and community-based groups working with vulnerable populations.
Based on the interviews, the project team will provide recommendations to GEM, such as: what community leaders need to initiate risk mitigating action, which individuals or groups in communities are most likely to use GEM's tools, and how GEM can best communicate its information in ways that are readily usable by its beneficiaries. The project began December 2010 and is scheduled to finish in May 2012.
¹This information typically would include the expected size of earthquakes on known faults, the type and number of buildings and other infrastructure that are common in specific cities or regions, the known weaknesses of these structures, and the number of people living, working or otherwise dependent on these structures, among other factors. Taken together, these data help provide a snapshot of the earthquake risk faced by a city or region and can be used to make predictions about the extent of loss (damage, fatalities, casualties) at a given location and its impact on the economy and society.
