UCL LUNCH HOUR LECTURES

Dr Tiziana Rossetto – UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering

In engineering, earthquake vulnerability is traditionally thought of as the likelihood of damage (or collapse) occurring in the built environment under earthquake loading. Human losses, in terms of deaths and injuries, are assumed to be linked to the vulnerability of the built environment and are derived from the latter through fairly simplistic approaches. Societal impact is practically never assessed, nor is societal composition or factors of resilience included in the majority of human loss calculations. This lecture advocates that the traditional barriers between disciplines (such as engineering and social sciences) need to be overcome in order to advance the state-of-the-art in earthquake vulnerability assessment, and presents some attempts for doing this.