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.

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.

Earthquake reconnaissance plays an invaluable role in earthquake engineering, as it enables the collection of perishable data on building performance that are otherwise unobtainable. Such data can be used to prepare damage statistics, calibrate and validate engineering models and crucially, to decide what design and/or construction deficiencies lead to inadequate structural performance. This research goes beyond the immediate needs of engineers as it can provide the evidence base for the development of new disaster risk reduction policies and mitigation practices worldwide. In the UK, earthquake field investigations have been conducted by EEFIT since 1982, reporting on the damage observed and inspiring research into building standards for earthquake resistant design and assessment. This research will use the experience gained in EP/I01778X/1 to continue and expand important work in reducing and eventually eradicating the risk of significant death, damage to the economy, and social upheaval resulting from earthquakes. This grant will enable UK based academics to continue to participate in earthquake field investigations conducted by EEFIT and to improve coordination with international equivalents in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe. grow UK earthquake risk reduction activities, improve the dissemination of EEFIT Mission findings and further increase their impact. Not only will this research continue to collect valuable information in the aftermath of a disaster, but it will also develop new methods of collecting and interpreting this data as well and further develop standard international disaster data collection protocols. This data will be housed in a unique future proof repository that will allow researchers and other stakeholders to easily access and use the information This is important as not only will it enable the UK to stay at the forefront of earthquake engineering research, but it will assist donor countries and other organizations to more accurately access the severity of the disaster and therefore to better target the correct amount of resource for relief and rebuilding efforts.