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，造成人员伤亡、基础设施破坏、经济和环境损失。特别是地震，是最具破坏性的，因为它们每年造成超过2万人死亡，占自然灾害造成的年度经济损失的20%。在低收入或发展中国家，地震的影响加剧，导致大量人员伤亡、无家可归和人口流离失所。不可修复的基础设施损坏也会造成巨大的经济影响，其影响可达一个国家国内总收入的20%，导致经济增长和发展中断。认识到这一问题，国家对评估主要城市的区域地震风险和损失的兴趣越来越大。一些国家启动了灾害风险管理方案，利用科学和技术领域的跨学科进展，模拟灾害、风险和脆弱性之间复杂的相互作用，计算损失指标，利益攸关方和决策者可利用这些指标量化潜在的结构、经济和社会后果，确定关键的基础设施组成部分，概述灾前减轻损害的措施和政策，埃及是一个低收入国家，也是非洲人口最多的国家之一，极易受到自然灾害（洪水、海平面上升和地震）的影响。一些人口超过500万的大城市和人口过于密集的城市中心，受到贫困，气候变化，数十年的不良建筑实践和缺乏市政监督等风险驱动因素引发的高地震风险。城市状况类似的国家，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分配了大量资金和资源。另一方面，埃及基础设施的安全性和稳健性研究严重不足。虽然有几项研究调查了埃及主要城市的地震危险性，但迄今为止还没有注意到倒塌风险评估或损失和损害估计（城市暴露，脆弱性和恢复力）。南安普顿大学，埃及三个顶级学术和研究机构之间的合作伙伴关系将承担这个项目，结合不同的学科跨越城市规划，地震学和结构工程。该项目将利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框架的组成部分。亚历山大市中心的地震脆弱性将在人类，结构和经济损失方面进行评估，由于潜在的破坏住宅建筑存量。在此过程中，将收集空间城市、岩土工程、结构和灾害数据，并开发自动化数字框架，以量化潜在地震情景下的风险和损失。该项目将采用地理信息系统（GIS）绘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做出有效的地震保护措施决策，以最大限度地减少未来地震中的潜在破坏和损失（主要是人力损失，但也包括经济损失）。通过网络、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复原力，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.