Geographic information system to assess and mitigate natural disasters

The project, ‘Seismic Resilience of Egypt's Built Environment: A GIS-Based Framework for Assessment and Mitigation’ (Egypt-SeReAM), has received £133.5K from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop the technology.

Researchers said that natural disasters can have dire effects on entire countries in the form of human casualties, infrastructure damage, and economic and environmental losses.

Earthquakes are the most damaging as they are responsible for an annual death toll of over 20,000 and 20 per cent of total annual economic losses due to natural disasters.

As such, researchers said there has been growing national interest in assessing regional seismic risk and loss for major cities.

Several countries have initiated Disaster Risk Management (DRM) programmes, which make use of the interdisciplinary advances in science and technology, to model the complex interaction of hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and compute loss metrics.

This data can be used by stakeholders and decision-makers to quantify potential structural, economic, and social consequences, and to identify critical infrastructure components, outline pre-disaster damage mitigation measures, and plan for post-disaster response protocols.