Southampton University has partnered with three of Egypt’s top institutions in a project aiming to assess and mitigate natural disasters through geographic information system (GIS) mapping technology.
The project, ‘Seismic Resilience of Egypt’s Built Environment: A GIS-Based Framework for Assessment and Mitigation’ (Egypt-SeReAM), has received £133.5K from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop the technology. Researchers said that natural disasters can have dire effects on entire countries in the form of human casualties, infrastructure damage, and economic and environmental losses.
As such, researchers said there has been growing national interest in assessing regional seismic risk and loss for major cities. According to the researchers, Egypt is particularly susceptible to the impacts of natural hazards. It has several major cities with overly populated urban centres which are subject to high seismic risk triggered by risk drivers including poverty, climate change, decades of poor construction practices, and absence of municipal oversight. However, researchers said that 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 to collapse risk assessment or loss and damage estimations.
