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Earthquakes and their potentially devastating impacts have caused awe and curiosity as far back as records have been written.

The use of catastrophe models in general and earthquake models in particular has become standard practice in the property (re)insurance industry and increasingly in public/private disaster risk management applications. Earthquake hazard and vulnerability science are now multidisciplinary fields that integrate geology, tectonics, seismology, geodesy, statistics, engineering seismology, and structural engineering.

This AIR study provides an overview of the main scientific developments in earthquake ground shaking hazard science, with an emphasis on the last 30 years. We delve into the challenges of earthquake hazard modeling in different parts of the world—with different tectonic settings, levels of earthquake activity, and data availability—and assess how contributions from different fields and/or regions have evolved and shaped the global state of the art. Having looked at the past and present, in the last chapter we introduce three key areas of seismic hazard research that we believe will pave the way for the next key developments in earthquake loss modeling.


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