A geophysics-informed pro-poor approach to earthquake risk management

This paper proposes a framework to support decision-making on earthquake risk policies, which explicitly integrates information on the geophysics of an urban system as well as its physical and social environment. The framework is based on the Tomorrow’s Cities Decision Support Environment, which was designed to support urban planning with a focus on pro-poor disaster risk reduction in countries of the Global South.

This study is further underpinned by a cost–benefit analysis, which facilitates the assessment of potential policies in terms of both their ability to reduce earthquake risk as well as their value for (often limited) money. The authors illustrate the framework using a well-established virtual urban testbed based on Global South cities, which reveals that geophysics-informed policy making can successfully lead to pro-poor earthquake risk reduction.