Sub-Saharan Hazard and Risk Assessment (SSAHARA) Project
Background
With the support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Global Earthquake Model led a program in East Sub-Saharan Africa to develop the first uniform and open earthquake loss model. This effort resulted in a probabilistic seismic hazard analysis model, exposure datasets for the residential building stock, and sets of damage functions for Ethiopia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda Malawi, Uganda, and Kenya. This project allowed identifying the region with a high potential for economic and human losses. These activities also included capacity building and training events in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), with representatives from eight countries from the region.
Objectives
The project aimed to develop preliminary risk models for eight countries in Africa, namely Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Mozambique, Burundi and Rwanda. GEM extended its activities to cover all the 26 active seismic countries in Africa in the second phase of its activities. In order to calculate reliable risk metrics for all countries, participants were invited to review the mapping scheme used to compute exposure models.
Results
The risk team was responsible for the collection of exposure data at the national level for Ethiopia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda Malawi, Uganda, and Kenya. Numerous mapping schemes for urban and rural areas were developed to convert general exposure data into exposure models for risk analysis. For the most common types of construction, analytical analyses were performed to develop fragility and vulnerability functions, which were then employed for the assessment of a number of earthquake scenarios. Probabilistic seismic risk analyses were performed using the OpenQuake-engine to calculate average annual economic and human losses, as well as the expected aggregated losses for a number of return periods.
Scope
Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda
Year
2014 - 2016
Status
Completed
Funding partners
USAID
Wiki site
For more details, visit the project's Wiki site https://ssahara.openquake.org
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