Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction to host earthquake risk presentation in April

The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) has announced that it will host an earthquake risk presentation next month.

The Dynamics of Urban Earthquake Risk presentation will be held from 10 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. on April 17. It will explore how urban seismic risk is changing over time and whether cities are becoming safer due to advances in earthquake engineering or if risk is growing as a result of societal factors such as population expansion and urban development.

In a case study of Metro Vancouver, a loss estimation model is developed to estimate potential losses for the same seismic event over seven decades of rapid population growth. The presentation concludes by considering the generalizability of the Vancouver results to other urban areas, as well as the importance of understanding urban risk dynamics for public policy and the insurance industry.

Stephanie E. Chang (pictured right), a professor at the University of British Columbia, with the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) and the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability (IRES), is expected to speak at the event. She recently held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Disaster Management and Urban Sustainability (2004-2013) and her specialty is in the socio-economic impact of natural disasters, particularly earthquakes. She has also published extensively on economic impacts of disasters, modelling disaster losses, urban risk dynamics, critical infrastructure systems and their interdependencies, economic evaluation of disaster mitigations and urban disaster recovery.

The presentation is part of the ICLR’s Friday Forum series.

The event is available by Webex at Webex:

https://iclr.webex.com/iclr/onstage/g.php?MTID=efbe31854fcd80020b403b8175cdc8ac4 (password: quake)

Conference Call number:

Local: 416-343-2657

Toll free: 1-866-440-8938

Conference ID: 1712397#

Where: ICLR, 20 Richmond Street East, Suite 210, Toronto

RSVP: Tracy Waddington (twaddington@iclr.org)