Over half a million people died in the last decade due to earthquakes and tsunamis, most of these in the developing world, where the risk is increasing due to rapid population growth and urbanization. Yet in many earthquake-prone regions no risk models exist, and even where models do exist, they are inaccessible. Better risk awareness can reduce the toll that earthquakes take by leading to improved planning, construction, emergency response, and greater access to insurance.

Responding to a call from the Global Science Forum of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Global Earthquake Model will provide an authoritative standard for calculating and communicating earthquake hazard and risk by developing needed global datasets, building open-source tools, and engaging scientists and engineers and users around the world.

The overall aim of GEM is to produce software and tools that help to reduce earthquake deaths, destruction, dislocation, and monetary losses. GEM will provide a basis for comparing earthquake risks across regions and across borders. GEM tools will be usable at the community, national and international level for uniform earthquake risk evaluation and as a defensible basis for risk mitigation plans. GEM results will be disseminated widely and openly. GEM will be inclusive, it will be politcally, scientifically, and commerically independent, and GEM will build technical capacity and promote awareness raising activities.

GEM is thus a public-private partnership that serves a humanitarian imperative while offering a key to sustainable development, and promotes a larger involvement of the insurance and financial sectors. GEM will take 5 years to build its first working model, though the engagement of the scientific research community worldwide and the deployment of a number of independently-driven Regional Programmes.