Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Canada has a high likelihood of facing significant earthquake threats in future. In Eastern Canada, damaging earthquakes occurred in the Charlevoix and Western Quebec seismic zones and recurrence of similar events is anticipated. In Western Canada, British Columbia is exposed to major seismic hazards and related secondary hazards (e.g. tsunami and liquefaction), originating from the Cascadia subduction zone. Scenarios of particular concern to Canadian residents, emergency managers and businesses are the future occurrences of a mega-thrust earthquake in Cascadia and a moderate earthquake along St Lawrence River (Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City corridor), which will generate large-scale multi-hazard cascades and affect the population and built environment simultaneously. Dr Goda will develop integrated disaster risk reduction tools for earthquake catastrophes by implementing innovative performance-based multi-hazard engineering methods and recognizing three main phases of disaster risk management: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. The program will address cascading hazards (shaking-tsunami-aftershocks) by accounting for physical causes of the multi-hazards and by evaluating the effectiveness of response and recovery measures for mitigating impacts and enhancing seismic resilience of built environments. The tools enable new approaches for more efficient disaster risk management and mitigation over the entire disaster cycle. Over the next 5 years, the following short-term objectives are focused upon: 1) develop an integrated multi-hazard impact assessment methodology for cascading earthquake-related phenomena by accounting for uncertainties associated with concurrent hazard processes comprehensively and consistently; 2) apply the multi-hazard method to Canada and other global regions for assessing mitigation-preparedness against cascading seismic hazards and risks; 3) develop a new generation of risk-based early warning-evacuation systems and real-time risk forecasting methods for response, and 4) develop new financial risk transfer countermeasures for recovery. Obj. 1 constitutes the core innovation of INSPIRE, and Obj. 2-4 are the exemplars of how the developed tools can be applied to provide innovative solutions to current challenges in the context of catastrophic earthquake risk. The new assessment tools will improve current practices of preparing shaking and tsunami hazard maps, which are developed separately and are based on different methods, data, assumptions, and scenarios. They will also be used to design new early warning and rapid risk forecasting systems and financial risk transfer instrument to enhance the seismic preparedness and resilience of households, municipalities, and insurers. Ultimately, this program will promote more robust natural disaster risk management using consistent multi-hazard maps and assessments that correspond to the same set of earthquake scenarios and risk financing countermeasures.