Agrawal Himanshu, Wang Chenbo, Cremen Gemma, McCloskey John
School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, London, UK.
Nat Hazards (Dordr). 2025;121(6):6901-6919. doi: 10.1007/s11069-024-06983-6. Epub 2024 Dec 16.
Recent earthquake disasters have highlighted an urgent need for continuous advancements in approaches to reducing seismic risk. Decision-making on such strategies should consider subsurface geophysical information (e.g., seismic site response), given its direct link to seismic hazard. This may be particularly important in regions where the poorest in society often reside in areas with softer soils that lead to higher ground-motion amplifications. In this context, we propose 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. It 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. We 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.
近期的地震灾害凸显了持续推进降低地震风险方法的迫切需求。鉴于地下地球物理信息（如地震场地响应）与地震危险存在直接关联，此类策略的决策应考虑该信息。在社会最贫困人群往往居住在土壤较软、地面运动放大效应较高地区的区域，这一点可能尤为重要。在此背景下，我们提出一个框架来支持地震风险政策的决策，该框架明确整合了城市系统的地球物理信息及其物理和社会环境信息。该框架基于“明日城市决策支持环境”，其旨在支持城市规划，重点是在全球南方国家减少有利于穷人的灾害风险。它还以成本效益分析为支撑，这有助于从降低地震风险的能力以及（通常有限的）资金价值两方面评估潜在政策。我们使用一个基于全球南方城市的成熟虚拟城市试验台来说明该框架，结果表明基于地球物理信息的政策制定能够成功实现有利于穷人的地震风险降低。
