The field of earthquake science and engineering has matured enormously in the past 100 years, but there remain large gaps in fundamental knowledge.
The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) aims to effectively contribute to enable commitments to disaster risk reduction under the proposed HFA2 by providing communities and organizations with state-of-the-art tools and data, technology transfer and training and risk assessment projects.
On 13 March, a unique symposium on earthquake risk – “Powering Asian organisations with GEM’s OpenQuake tools – assessing earthquake risk collaboratively” – organized in joint cooperation with OYO, NIED and IRIDeS was held in IRIDeS Building, Sendai, Japan during the 3rd World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.
Four presentations were given, which featured examples of how public and private organizations are applying innovative tools and approaches to assess risk in Asia, and to recover from devastating earthquake events. See Programme
During the WCDRR from 14 to 18 March, a dedicated GEM booth “New frontiers in earthquake risk assessment and management” was also set up at the Sendai Mediatheque. The booth gave conference attendees the chance to directly experience the open and freely available data, tools and resources for calculating and exploring earthquake risk. The booth housed the OpenQuake platform that was used for testing which also showcased best cases from different part of the world featuring GEM resources applied for disaster risk reduction.
The GEM Foundation is committed to playing a significant role in disaster risk reduction by developing and communicating earthquake hazard and risk information and making them freely available for the entire community. As a testament of taking active part in the global debate on earthquake risk, the GEM Foundation Statement for Sendai, describing their commitment to understanding risk and increasing resilience to earthquakes worldwide, in line with the post-2015 framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was also released.
