[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ountries like Japan and Italy that frequently face major urban earthquake disasters are better equipped to design disaster risk reduction (DRR) plans that help mitigate the impacts of future disaster events. This is because the public understands that earthquakes are an imminent threat; widely held recognition that investing in DRR today will save lives and protect the country’s economic well-being also exists.  In countries that lack recent earthquake experience yet remain highly prone and vulnerable, it is paramount to articulate what the impact of an earthquake may look like by developing a realistic disaster scenario to engage the public and private sector, and international development community. Using risk modeling is an evidenced-based approach to DRR.

Over the last 30 years, Miyamoto has developed a comprehensive database on all types of buildings in diverse geographical locations and their respective fragility or resilience in an earthquake. Miyamoto’s risk engineering team has further advanced this large bank of data into a risk analysis model, known as MiyamotoQuake.

Utilizing a state-of-art approach to probabilistic analysis, MiyamotoQuake helps us better understand risk by identifying probabilistic disaster outcomes, and providing a realistic picture of the impact of an earthquake on a population and its built environment.

MiyamotoQuake is unique in that the probabilistic outcomes are focused on social consequences of earthquakes, including expected number of fatalities, injuries and internally displaced people (IDP), expected number of light- medium- and heavily damaged buildings and the volume of debris. It does more than just narrowly focus on financial risk and economic loss as with most other risk-analysis platforms. MiyamotoQuake is suited for guiding DRR planning and investment in developing countries. Miyamoto has extensive experience in supporting governments and development partners to use this data and the scenarios as advocacy and planning tools guiding action for disaster risk reduction and greater resilience.

The team also has expertise in using other open source risk modeling platforms, such as HAZUS and the Global Earthquake Model’s OpenQuake.