Theme Lecture – Towards the development of a uniform seismic risk model in Europe
The lecture will present a short outline of the H2020 EU SERA project (http://www.sera-eu.org/en/home/), aiming to develop and offer to the European research community an open access to a uniform seismic hazard model at European scale, following to this regard past work and results in EU projects like SHARE.
The aim is to extend the previous SHARE model to European integrated risk in order to estimate probabilistic losses to residential, commercial and industrial buildings and their occupants, and to produce impact maps to show the influence of socio-economic indicators on human lives, economic resilience and recovery.
The model comprises three main components, i.e., seismic hazard, building exposure model and physical – socioeconomic vulnerability models. Seismic hazard for rock site conditions developed within SERA project, which is an upgrade and further development of the past SHARE project, is properly amplified to account for site effects using different approaches. Exposure model for residential buildings is developed based on the results from recent European Population and Housing Census. The taxonomy scheme of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) initiative is applied, which allows buildings to be classified according to a number of structural attributes, i.e., main construction material, lateral load resisting system, number of storey, age of construction and seismic design level. Finally the assessment of the physical and socioeconomic losses is estimated using appropriate vulnerability models. The integrated risk model will provide estimates of critical risk metrics, such as average annual economic and human losses, useful for the development of seismic risk mitigation planning, and will be a valuable contribution to the generation of a uniform European-wide seismic risk model.