Creating a Global Building Inventory for Earthquake Loss Assessment and Risk Management

摘要

Earthquakes have claimed approximately 8 million lives over the last 2,000 years and fatality rates are likely to continue to rise with increased population and urbanizations of global settlements especially in developing countries. More than 75% of earthquake-related human casualties are caused by the collapse of buildings or structures. It is disheartening to note that large fractions of the world's population still reside in informal, poorly-constructed & non-engineered dwellings which have high susceptibility to collapse during earthquakes. Moreover, with increasing urbanization half of world's population now lives in urban areas, and half of these urban centers are located in earthquake-prone regions. The poor performance of most building stocks during earthquakes remains a primary societal concern. However, despite this dark history and bleaker future trends, there are no comprehensive global building inventories of sufficient quality and coverage to adequately address and characterize future earthquake losses. Such an inventory is vital both for earthquake loss mitigation and for earthquake disaster response purposes. .