The historical effects of socio-economic damage of earthquakes, and their secondary effects (tsunami, fire, landslides, liquefaction and fault rupture) have been collected in many separate databases and references throughout the Asia-Pacific region and the world. In this study, a unified global catalogue of damaging earthquakes has been created over the last year to better understand the trends in vulnerability, exposure and possible future impacts of such historical earthquakes.
For the 32 countries included in this study, over 3500 damaging earthquakes have been examined from 2221BC with over 1700 damaging earthquakes from 1900 onwards. Although dominated by Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Philippines earthquakes, the number of deaths since 1900 in the Asia-Pacific region has been found to be approximately 1.16 million. Statistics for injured, homeless and affected, building damage, insured loss, economic loss and secondary effect information are also included. In all parts of the Asia-Pacific region especially in Australia, China, Indonesia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Japan, an increasing trend in economic damage due to earthquakes is characterised by increasing exposure and vulnerability. The 2008 Sichuan earthquake with over $128 billion USD damage and the 1995 Kobe Earthquake with $183 billion USD damage (2010-adjusted), show the increasing concern for settlements in terms of economic loss from earthquakes. Due to the lack of information about damaging earthquakes before 1800 in the southern Asia-Pacific region, increasing awareness of earthquake risk is required. Using the trends shown in this study, planning, increased awareness, risk reduction and scenario-based risk analysis programs can be implemented.