Mitigating earthquake disasters involves several key elements, from hazard assessment to impacts quantification and reduction. Core components are: a) the analysis of hazards, ground shaking and cascading effects on natural and built environments; b) the assessment of vulnerability and exposure to hazards for buildings, infrastructures and people; c) risk management, from short-term emergency response and recovery to long-term governance and preparedness actions.
Given the complexity of earthquake-related hazards and their impact on different systems, diverse seismic hazard and risk models are needed at multiple spatial and temporal scales, relying on multi-disciplinary data and requiring testing and validation of all components to ensure effective mitigation.
From the real-time integration of multi-parametric observations is expected the major contribution to the development of operational time-Dependent Assessment of Seismic Hazard (t-DASH) systems, suitable for supporting decision makers with continuously updated seismic hazard scenarios. A very preliminary step in this direction is the identification of those parameters (seismological, chemical, physical, etc.) whose space-time dynamics and/or anomalous variations can be, to some extent, associated with the complex process of preparation of major earthquakes.
This session includes studies on various aspects of seismic risk research and assessment, ground and satellite-based data analysis and methods, within the t-DASH and Short-term Earthquakes Forecast perspectives:
- Development of physical and statistical models (including AI and machine learning) for hazard, exposure and vulnerability;
- Studies on time-dependent seismic hazard and risk assessments
- Development of systems providing pre- and post-event information, together with early warning and alert tools for effective emergency management;
- Earthquake cascading hazards (e.g. landslides and tsunamis) and multi-risk scenarios development;
- Social vulnerability assessment, along with advances in citizen-science, communication, governance and risk awareness research.
- Studies devoted to the description of genetic models of earthquake’s precursory phenomena
- Infrastructures devoted to maintain and further develop our present observational capabilities of earthquake-related phenomena, also contributing to building a global multi-parametric EarthQuakes Observing System (EQuOS) to complement the existing GEOSS initiatives.