AIR to sponsor Global Earthquake Model

AIR Worldwide Corporation has announced it is sponsoring the Global Earthquake Model (GEM).
The GEM project is a five-year project led by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to produce the world’s first global, open source model for seismic risk assessment.
Munich Re, Zurich Financial Services, and Willis are also GEM private sponsors.
GEM creates an independent standard to estimate earthquake risk, raise awareness, promote mitigation and stimulate insurance and risk sharing, according to a release.
The GEM initiative brings together leading scientists from around the world to create open source models based on data sets and model components that are assembled using a systematic and uniform approach for all regions.
Such data sets may include: clean historical catalogs and fault databases, data on ground motion observations for historical events, vulnerability of structures in different countries and damage and loss information for historical events, the release continues.
“The Global Earthquake Model project generates information of the highest standard through cooperation between many of the world’s top earthquake experts,” said Dr. Ross Stein, geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey & GEM co-founder.