Seismic Resilience of Egypt's Built Environment: A GIS-Based Framework for Assessment and Mitigation (Egypt-SeReAM)

自然灾害可能对各国造成严重影响，表现为人员伤亡、基础设施破坏、经济和环境损失。尤其是地震是最具破坏性的，因为每年造成的死亡人数超过2万人，占自然灾害造成的年度经济损失总额的20%。在低收入国家或发展中国家，地震影响加剧，导致大量人员伤亡、无家可归和人口流离失所。不可挽回的基础设施损坏也可能产生巨大的经济影响，达到一个国家国内生产总值的20%，导致经济增长和发展中断。认识到这个问题，国家越来越关注评估区域地震风险和大城市的损失。几个国家启动了灾害风险管理(DRM)计划，利用科学和技术的跨学科进步来模拟灾害、暴露和脆弱性之间的复杂相互作用，并计算损失指标，利益相关者和决策者可以使用这些指标来量化潜在的结构、经济和社会后果，确定关键的基础设施组件，概述灾前减灾措施和政策，并规划灾后应对协议。埃及是一个低收入国家，也是非洲人口最多的国家之一，非常容易受到自然灾害(洪水、海平面上升和地震)的影响。几个人口超过500万、市中心人口过多的大城市，面临着由贫困、气候变化、数十年来糟糕的建设实践以及缺乏市政监管等风险驱动引发的高地震风险。具有类似城市条件的国家，如阿尔巴尼亚和土耳其，在最近的地震中遭受了广泛的破坏和损失。这些国家和其他国家为DRM分配了大量的资金和资源。另一方面，埃及基础设施的安全性和健壮性研究严重不足。尽管几项研究调查了埃及主要城市的地震危险性，但到目前为止还没有关注坍塌风险评估或损失和损害估计(城市暴露、脆弱性和恢复力)。埃及-SeReAM将在现有DRM方法的基础上并进一步发展，以创建这样一个数字框架，用于评估埃及脆弱的建筑环境的地震恢复力。南安普顿大学和埃及三家顶尖学术和研究机构将合作开展这一项目，将城市规划、地震学和结构工程等不同学科结合起来。该项目将使用亚历山大市作为试点案例研究，以建立与建筑环境复原力有关的DRM框架的基础。将评估亚历山大市市中心的地震易损性，包括由于住宅建筑存量可能受到的破坏而造成的人员、结构和经济损失。在这一过程中，将收集城市、岩土、结构和灾害的空间数据，并将开发一个自动化的数字框架，以量化潜在地震情景下的风险和损失。该项目将使用地理信息系统(GIS)地图系统来描述地震后果并将其传达给政府、学术界、工业界和公共部门。这将被打包在一个易于使用的以实践为导向的数字工作流程中，该工作流程将帮助当局就地震防护措施做出有效决策，以最大限度地减少未来地震的潜在损害和损失(主要是人的损失，但也包括经济损失)。通过联网、培训和展示活动，该项目将促进并特别针对埃及对自然灾害的短期和长期恢复能力，以支持其经济发展。

Natural disasters can have dire effects on countries, in the form of human casualties/injuries, infrastructure damage, economic and environmental losses. Earthquakes, in particular, are the most damaging as they are responsible for an annual death toll of over 20K and 20% of the total annual economic losses due to natural disasters. In low-income or developing countries, earthquake impacts are exacerbated, leading to substantial human loss, injuries, homelessness, and population displacement. Irreparable infrastructure damage can also have a great economic impact reaching 20% of a country's gross domestic income, leading to disruption of economic growth and development.Acknowledging this problem, there has been growing national interest in assessing regional seismic risk and loss for major cities. Several countries initiated Disaster Risk Management (DRM) programs which make use of the interdisciplinary advances in science and technology to model the complex interaction of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability and compute loss metrics that can be used by stakeholders and decision-makers to quantify of potential structural, economic, and social consequences, identify critical infrastructure components, outline pre-disaster damage mitigation measures and policies, and planning for post-disaster response protocols.Egypt, a lower-income country and one of Africa's most populated countries, is highly susceptible to the impacts of natural hazards (flooding, rising sea levels, and earthquakes). Several major cities, with populations larger than 5M and overly populated urban centers, are subject to high seismic risk triggered by risk drives such as poverty, climate change, decades of poor construction practices, and absence of municipal oversight. Countries with similar urban conditions, such as Albania and Turkey, experienced a wide extent of damage and losses from recent earthquakes. These countries, and others, allocate extensive funding and resources for DRM. On the other hand, the safety and robustness of Egypt's infrastructure is greatly under-researched. Although several studies investigated the seismic hazard for Egypt's major cities, no attention has been paid so far to either collapse risk assessment or loss and damage estimations (urban exposure, vulnerabilities, and resilience).Egypt-SeReAM will build on and further develop existing DRM methodologies to create such a digital framework for assessing the seismic resilience of Egypt's vulnerable built environment. A partnership between the University of Southampton, three of Egypt's top academic and research institutions will undertake this project combining different disciplines spanning urban planning, seismology, and structural engineering. The project will use the city of Alexandria as a pilot case study to establish the building blocks of the DRM framework concerned with built-environment resilience. The seismic vulnerability of Alexandria's urban center will be assessed, in terms of human, structural, and economic losses due to potential damage to the residential building stock. In the process, spatial urban, geotechnical, structural, and hazard data will be collected and an automated digital framework will be developed to quantify risk and loss under potential earthquake scenarios. The project will employ the geographic information system (GIS) mapping system to describe and communicate the earthquake consequences to the government, academia, industry, and public sectors. This will be packaged within an easily-to-use practice-oriented digital workflow that will assist authorities in making effective decisions for seismic protection measures to minimize potential damage and losses (primarily human, but financial as well) in future earthquakes. Through networking, training, and showcasing activities, the project will promote and specifically target Egypt's short- and long-term resilience to natural disasters, in support of its economic development.