The Global Exposure Model#

The v2025.0.0 release for the Global Exposure Model is now available! 🥳 🚀

Modeled projections based on data from 215 countries

👥 Population and Building classes

  • 📍 53% of the world population (>4.1 billion people) lives in areas exposed to moderate to high levels of seismic hazard (PGA > 0.10g).

  • 🏠 Half of the buildings in the world are made of unreinforced masonry (32%) or wood (21%).

  • 🇮🇳 India is the country that concentrates the largest number of buiuldings (233 million)

💰 Economic value of Buildings

  • 🔢 $300 trillion is the estimated total replacement cost of buildings (residential, commercial and industrial) worldwide, based on our latest risk models.

  • 🇺🇸 The United States of America concentrates the largest replacement cost, with $18 trillion.

  • 🌎 90% of the total replacement cost is concentrated in three regions, North America, East Asia, and Europe.

🏠 Buildings Vulnerability

  • 🚶‍♂️ More than half of the population in the world lives in buildings with no seismic provisions (vulnerable to earthquakes).

  • 🔨 <15% of the buildings follow modern building codes with moderate to high ductility.

  • 🗺️ Something to add here.

📉 Countries with the highest exposure At the global scale, 20 countries concentrate large fractions of both buildings and replacement cost (70% of the total number of buildings and 85% of the total replacement cost):

Country

Buildings (Million)

Replacement cost (Trillion USD)

🇮🇳 India

232.5

3.0

🇨🇳 China

218.0

46.2

🇺🇸 United States

115.6

80.1

🇧🇷 Brazil

61.1

5.3

🇮🇩 Indonesia

45.6

2.3

🇯🇵 Japan

35.2

22.5

🇲🇽 Mexico

33.9

4.9

🇩🇪 Germany

19.9

12.1

🇷🇺 Russia

18.7

5.2

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

15.5

6.3

📢 Why This Matters

These insights come from GEM’s state-of-the-art exposure model, helping governments, insurers, and disaster response teams anticipate and mitigate earthquake impacts. The most vulnerable communities are often the hardest hit. Strengthening earthquake resilience, especially in developing regions, is essential to saving lives and protecting livelihoods.

Global maps#

Buildings exposed to different levels of seismic hazard#

Building counts#

Buildings distributed

Buildings Adm1

Cost Adm1

Cost/Area Adm1

Predominant material of construction#

Unreinforced masonry

Adobe or Earth

Reinforced/Confined masonry

Wood

Reinforced concrete

Others

Global summaries#

Continent summaries#

GEM_Region summaries#

Countribution from top 20 countries#

Buildings and Cost per capita and per area#

🚀 Model versions#

Each version of the model that is released can be accessed by changing from the main branch to the tag of a given version. The main branch could contain the work-in-progress of the next version of the model.

Version

Release Notes

v2025.0.0

See summary of changes in Whats new.

v2023.1.0

Exposure was spatially disaggregated for many countries. Revised taxonomy map.

v2023.0.0

Minor update relative to v2022.0.0. Population has been distributed across day, night, and transit time periods.

v2022.0.0

The model has been updated to reflect cost updates to 2021 figures

v2018.0.0

Original version within the larger 2018 Global Exposure Model release.