International: Embedding analysis of seismic hazard and risk for improved welfare in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

The country of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia is exposed to the hazards of earthquakes. The tectonic collision of the Earth's plates is creating huge mountains in this region. These mountains are created from earthquakes on large faults along the northern Tien Shan mountain range. Kyrgyzstan's' capital, Bishkek, lies on top of one of these major fault lines and is home to a million people. In the past, major cities that exist along the northern edge of this mountain range, such as Almaty to the east, have been destroyed in large earthquakes at the end of the 19th Century. This occurred when they were relatively small towns. The impact today from similar sized earthquakes would have a much more devastating effect if it were to strike the major city of Bishkek. The rapid expansion of cities in poorer countries has meant that a large number of buildings are not strong enough to be resilient to earthquakes.

We want to help the Government ministries in Bishkek, such as the Ministry for Construction and also for Emergency Situations, to be able to better assess the potential impact for earthquakes to strike the city in future. We will do this by providing them with estimates of how many people may die in future earthquakes, how many buildings will be damaged or collapse, and how much such an earthquake will cost financially. We will also provide maps of where we think the city will be most affected by different types of earthquakes, as small nearby earthquakes can have as big an impact as distant large ones. This will enable the Kyrgyz government ministries to target where in the city key buildings, such as schools and hospitals, should be reinforced, as well as to better plan where new housing estates should be built, and also to enforce the seismic building codes to make sure the buildings are built better.

In order to provide this latest information, we will be working with the Institute of Seismology in Bishkek, whose responsibility it is to provide these kinds of estimates of seismic risk. We are therefore working directly with the organisation that has the mandate to provide information to the government and by doing so we will ensure that our work will also have an impact. We are also going to train the institute staff to be able to update these estimates of losses so that they have the capacity to continue this work once we are no longer working on this project.

It is important to be able to keep updating the estimates of losses and maps of seismic risk. Cities are constantly enlarging. If these cities lie in earthquake prone areas, such as the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, this growth increases their exposure to seismic hazards, increasing the risk that people face. Often some of the best views over a city come from higher ground, but this high ground is created by faults that build mountains. The city of Bishkek is expanding southwards as the urban population grows, and homes are now being built right on top of these fault lines. Being very near to a fault increases the amount of shaking if an earthquake happens, and therefore increases the chances of the building collapsing, injuring or killing the occupants.

As well as the increased exposure to earthquake hazards, we are also discovering more active faults in the region through mapping out the fault lines and identifying past earthquake ruptures. It is important to incorporate this new information into the estimates of seismic hazard, as some very large earthquakes are known to have struck the region in the past. Therefore we will include this recent scientific information into our estimates of seismic hazard.

We are working with other partners, such as the Global Earthquake Model Foundation, which was created to serve the public good through collaboration, openness and transparency by providing credible assessments of seismic hazard and risk. Their open software "OpenQuake" enables us to do the calculations of seismic risk.

The expected benefit for our project partner, the Institute of Seismology, is the ability to provide estimates of potential earthquake building losses, human casualties and economic losses to government ministries, and to do so with high resolution for the city of Bishkek. This will augment their existing delivery of assessments of seismic hazards at the regional scale, by taking into account the vulnerability of the exposed buildings in Bishkek and therefore calculate the risks for a suite of potential earthquake scenarios. This will greatly enhance their capability to execute their responsibilities to the state. They will also benefit from our project bringing together other expert partners to collaborate and share their expertise, namely the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation, the British Geology Survey (BGS) and the Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes and Volcanoes (COMET). This project provides the resources to directly embed the capacity to continue this analysis beyond the extent of this grant, by providing training for young Kyrgyz institute staff to use the latest analysis, increasing their level of skill and critical analysis. This will provide an important ability to respond when required by the government agencies to provide seismic risk and hazard analysis for particular earthquake scenarios in the future. It newly provides the ability for the Institute to estimate the risk from secondary hazards such as earthquake triggered landslides and soil liquefaction.

The benefits for the government stakeholders are that this project will address a number of recommendations for a variety of ministries that the recent World Bank report listed, and was adopted by the Kyrgyz Republic. The knowledge of recently discovered active faults will be incorporated into the assessment of seismic hazard, as recommended to the Kyrgyz government as a top priority. The Local government for Bishkek will use these assessments to inform planning at the local level for the use of land in city growth. The Ministry of Emergency Situations will be able to provide expected numbers of casualties for earthquake scenarios, and identify the hospitals critical for response in such events. The Ministry of Construction will be able to develop and update seismic codes that will include these new seismic hazard maps. In particular, they will be able to incorporate the location of active geological faults to prohibit construction within a certain distance of such faults. This project will benefit the State Insurance Organisation by providing the estimates of potential future seismic losses from a range of earthquake scenarios that will ensure fair insurance pricing and the adequate provision of capitalisation.

Overall the expected outcome form this project will be to reduce the human and economic losses from future earthquakes through improved preparedness for such events and resilience of the buildings and government.

It is necessary to have the capacity to update seismic risk scenarios in future as the city of Bishkek continues to expand through urbanisation onto major fault systems to the south of the current conurbation (the changing exposure and vulnerability of buildings to collapse). Revisions to the analysis of the current level of risk are also needed as previously unrecognised major earthquake-generating fault sources are identified through new research and mapping (the earthquake source hazard). This is because our knowledge and understanding of active faults is constantly increasing, in part as a result of recent council and academy funded research in the Tien Shan undertaken by the investigators. Delivering this risk assessment capacity will facilitate a lasting impact for the city to plan its expansion and identify its increasing exposure to earthquakes, both as the city naturally grows and as new knowledge is garnered as to the location and proximity of the seismic hazards.