Asian disaster management news, a newsletter of and for the community of disaster risk management practitioners and development workers, vol. 10 no. 1 October-December 2004: earthquake vulnerability reduction in urban areas of Developing Countries

This volume's theme also includes: pre-positioned emergency rescue stores (PPERS), new earthquake preparedness strategy from NSET; regional and international initiatives in earthquake vulnerability reduction; IITK-BMTPC earthquake tips 6, how architectural features affect buildings during earthquakes.

The absence of any reliable mechanism to predict earthquakes makes them the most disastrous of all natural calamities. Earthquakes affected 19 million people in 2001, more than any other year of the decade and cost the world US$238 million in damages alone . Afghanistan, China, Iran, Indonesia, India, Japan, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines and Taiwan all lie within seismically active areas. Seismic risks to people and economic losses have been increasing due to the rapid pace of urbanization and increasingly dense city populations. Recent earthquakes in Iran, India, Taiwan and Turkey have yet again shown us how vulnerable urban areas are to the effects of earthquakes. There are two basic structural measures for reducing vulnerability: enforcing seismic building codes and imposing land use restrictions to limit settlements in hazard prone areas. With the steady pace of economic growth in Asia and the influx of rural migrants and investment funds to cities, urban centers have seen an increase in construction that often does not comply with local building codes. The extraordinary number of existing noncompliant buildings poses a serious challenge to earthquake mitigation. Earthquake events seem to have only a short-term effect on people’s motivation to enforce building codes in new construction and a host of problems diverts the attention of municipal bodies, local planners and engineers from enforcing seismic code regulations. In addition to the technical and legal aspects, there are socio-economic and political factors to consider.