Over 50 capital cities of the Least Developed Countries in the world lie on top of faults in regions that are building up significant stresses within the crust. This continually growing stress will eventually lead to future earthquakes. Earthquakes are a natural hazard that are killing an increasing number of people, in part because populations are growing and densifying into urban centres. The recurrence time between earthquakes may be hundreds of years; many cities that are large today were small towns or non-existent in the past when the last big earthquake struck. There is often little social and community memory and first-hand experience of these previous events. Furthermore, urban development in the intervening years has often hidden the expressions of the active earthquake faults beneath and around a city, making them harder to identify today. In the Least Developed Countries, the impact of earthquakes on people's lives and livelihoods is much greater due to the vulnerability of buildings and communities. A major challenge has been to ensure that the mitigation of earthquake risk is a high priority in vulnerable cities, where earthquakes rarely occur but are devastating when they do. This is particularly difficult in cities in the least developed countries, where building earthquake resilience has to be balanced against other economic & social pressures facing cities & their development. We will develop a blueprint for the concept of "Seismic Cities", which we believe will be a powerful approach for raising awareness of the devastating potential of earthquakes in cities & for making them more sustainable & resilient to such shocks. This will be a biennial workshop & event that will bring together a range of stakeholders to target communities vulnerable to seismic hazard, and to develop more sustainable cities that can better cope with future environmental shocks from earthquakes. This will build on an existing successful concept of Cities On Volcanoes-a biennial conference and series of workshops that aims to reduce the impacts of volcanism & its effects on society by understanding volcanic phenomena, recognising the hazards & their impacts on people, emergency management, community education, case histories & risk mitigation. In order to test the effectiveness of our methodological approaches, as well as help develop the Seismic Cities concept, we will target a large city that has recently experience major earthquakes-Santiago in Chile. We will conduct interviews & focus groups with communities in the city to explore their own perceptions of risk & coping strategies. We will also document these experiences through story-telling & sensory mapping of the built environment, & create a virtual archive of these to which the community can add. Through co-production methods such as focus groups, walking trails, mobile interviewing, live projections & tours of both historic & contemporary urban sites, valuable data on the effects of earthquakes & their potential danger will be gathered. We will use satellite imagery to construct a 3D model of the built environment & highlight active fault structures within the city, integrating this with the community resources to better communicate the findings derived from the scientific data. The strategies to best prepare & protect the community can be embedded as community members become responsible for mapping & curating their own lived environments. The long-term (20-year) aim is to raise resilience to earthquake hazard across the whole world to the standards of the US, New Zealand & Japan. This is particularly challenging for many ODA-Recipient countries, where awareness of the threat from earthquakes may be low, & where increasing resilience to earthquake hazard may be a low priority. We envisage Seismic Cities as a flagship, high-profile event that significantly raises awareness in the host city, among both professionals & the public, drawing focus & resources to that city.

Electricity infrastructure is key to sustain human and economic wellbeing since it supplies energy to industrial, commercial and financial sectors, critical services (health, traffic control, water supply), communication networks, and hence almost all activities in modern societies. Consequently, the effects of long electricity blackouts have demonstrated impacts on economic activities and social stability and security. A framework for disaster management and resilience of the power sector is needed, beyond the occurrence of "average" outages contemplated in current security standards. This framework should consider network management under the occurrence of natural hazards such as earthquakes and tsunamis that may cause major blackouts, and assess proper measures to manage the associated disasters. Developing and implementing such a framework will be crucial to increase the opportunities for Chile and other countries, especially developing and low-income ones located around the Pacific Ring of Fire which are particularly exposed to the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis. In this context, this project will undertake holistic risk analyses associated with natural hazards on electricity networks along with identification of mitigation and adaptation measures that can allow us to manage the arising disasters. This holistic perspective of disaster management and resilience will be supported by development of mathematical models to, firstly, assess risks related to high impact low probability events, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, on the electric power systems. These models will then serve to identify an optimal portfolio of preventive and corrective measures that can support mitigation of impacts and compare different adaptation strategies. In particular, besides classical infrastructure reinforcement, we will assess how operational measures for disaster management, for instance though distributed energy systems, e.g., based on communities and microgrids, can provide system resilience. Building on this last point, resilience can in fact also be built through citizens and communities and by how they prepare for, and respond to, power outages. Such preparedness could for instance be led by the electricity companies and targeted at the individual and community levels by sharing accountability for response across the official responders, local officials, community groups, individual citizens, and the electricity companies. The aim is for households to have response strategies that are complemented by resilience measures prepared for (and by) the community. Such shared responsibility is becoming the response culture in the UK (with the very recent recognition of spontaneous volunteers as a source of untrained, unknown support which converges at the time of an incident). In developing countries, where the capacity of official responders may be insufficient given the scale of the disaster, the reliance on community preparedness and spontaneous emergence of willing helpers is more acute to lessen the effects of an incident and quicken the return to normality. Thus, in addition to more technical features, the framework developed here will explicitly include community resilience as a way to lessen the impact of outages and manage disasters. By analysing several case studies in Chile based on both data from past experiences and simulations, we will propose a general framework for disaster management and network and community resilience which can be applicable to other developing and low-income countries. We will use the research findings to develop networks standards following disasters along with a standard on community resilience to power outages. These standards will include socio-economic and engineering indicators that can support monitoring of network resilience and readiness to withstand natural, catastrophic events as well as quantifying impacts of such events after they occur, enhancing quality of post-mortem analysing

Electricity infrastructure is key to sustain human and economic well-being since it supplies energy to industrial, commercial and financial sectors, critical services (health, traffic control, water supply), communication networks, and hence almost all activities in modern societies. Consequently, the effects of long electricity blackouts have demonstrated impacts on economic activities and social stability and security. A framework for disaster management and resilience of the power sector is needed, beyond the occurrence of "average" outages contemplated in current security standards. This framework should consider network management under the occurrence of natural hazards such as earthquakes and tsunamis that may cause major blackouts, and assess proper measures to manage the associated disasters. Developing and implementing such a framework will be crucial to increase the opportunities for Chile and other countries, especially developing and low-income ones located around the Pacific Ring of Fire which are particularly exposed to the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis. In this context, this project will undertake holistic risk analyses associated with natural hazards on electricity networks along with identification of mitigation and adaptation measures that can allow us to manage the arising disasters. This holistic perspective of disaster management and resilience will be supported by development of mathematical models to firstly assess risks related to high impact low probability events, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, on the electric power systems. These models will then serve to identify an optimal portfolio of preventive and corrective measures that can support mitigation of impacts and compare different adaptation strategies. In particular, besides classical infrastructure reinforcement, we will assess how operational measures for disaster management, for instance though distributed energy systems, e.g., based on communities and microgrids, can provide system resilience. Building on this last point, resilience can in fact also be built through citizens and communities and by how they prepare for, and respond to, power outages. Such preparedness could for instance be led by the electricity companies and targeted at the individual and community levels by sharing accountability for response across the official respondents, local officials, community groups, individual citizens, and the electricity companies. The aim is for households to have response strategies that are complemented by resilience measures prepared for (and by) the community. Such shared responsibility is becoming the response culture in the UK (with the very recent recognition of spontaneous volunteers as a source of untrained, unknown support which converges at the time of an incident). In developing countries, where the capacity of official respondents may be insufficient given the scale of the disaster, the reliance on community preparedness and spontaneous emergence of willing helpers is more acute to lessen the effects of an incident and quicken the return to normality. Thus, in addition to more technical features, the framework developed here will explicitly include community resilience as a way to lessen the impact of outages and manage disasters. By analysing several case studies in Chile based on both data from past experiences and simulations, we will propose a general framework for disaster management and network and community resilience which can be applicable to other developing and low-income countries. We will use the research findings to develop networks standards following disasters along with a standard on community resilience to power outages. These standards will include socio-economic and engineering indicators that can support monitoring of network resilience and readiness to withstand natural, catastrophic events as well as quantifying impacts of such events after they occur, enhancing quality of post-morterm analysis.