The v2026.0.0 release for the GEM's global exposure model is now available! 🥳 🚀

Figure: Exposure model. Number of building at the first-administrative devision (top), and spatial distribution of building counts aggregated onto a discrete hexagonal grid (bottom)

GEM's Global Exposure Model covers 215 countries and territories. Exposure model insights help governments, insurers, and disaster response teams anticipate and mitigate earthquake impacts.

• 📍 Around 50% of the world population (~4.1 billion people) lives in areas exposed to moderate to high levels of seismic hazard (PGA > 0.10g on rock).
• 🏠 Almost half of the buildings in the world are made of unreinforced masonry (26%) or wood (20%).
• 🇮🇳 India is the country that concentrates the largest number of buiuldings (264 million)

• 🔢 $304 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 $105 trillion.
• 🌎 >80% of the total replacement cost is concentrated in three regions: North America, East Asia, and Europe.

• 🚶‍♂️ More than 70% of the population in the world lives in buildings with no seismic provisions (vulnerable to earthquakes).
• 🔨 <10% of the buildings follow modern building codes with moderate to high earthquake performance standards.

Figure: Global distribution of exposure by macro-taxonomy.

Figure: Top 25 countries by number of exposed buildings.

Figure: Global exposure by region and macrotaxonomy.

The GEM Global Exposure Model is organized into a mosaic of exposure regions. Although these regions generally follow widely recognized geographic conventions, some adaptations were made to ensure consistency with the GEM Global Mosaic of Seismic Hazard Models. The model outputs are structured hierarchically by region, country, and territory.

Figure: Mosaic of exposure and risk regions

| REGION                    | COUNTRIES |
|---------------------------|-----------|
| Africa                    | Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe |
| Caribbean Central America | Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, Montserrat, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, US Virgin Islands |
| Central Asia              | Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan |
| East Asia                 | China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macao, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan |
| Europe                    | Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom |
| Middle East               | Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen |
| North America             | Canada, Mexico, United States of America |
| North Asia                | Mongolia, Russia |
| Oceania                   | American Samoa, Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu |
| South America             | Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela |
| South Asia                | Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka |
| Southeast Asia            | Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, Vietnam |

A World directory contains the global results, while each regional directory contains subdirectories for the countries and territories within that region. Each country or territory directory includes the following information:

• Summaries: CSV tables and figures summarizing building exposure at the national (Adm0), subnational (Adm1), and taxonomy levels.
• Exposure model: Spatially disaggregated building exposure at 0.01 degrees (approximately 1km) resolution in csv.gz format, available for residential (RES), commercial (COM), and industrial (IND) occupancy classes.
• Vulnerability_mapping_ISO3.csv: Vulnerability mapping file per country or territory.

For more information, visit the GEM Global Risk Model documentation site. Spatially disaggregated models are also available and can be accessed by submitting a request through the GEM License Request page.

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. Check out here how to change the version

Within each regional directory, detailed descriptions of model updates and revisions are provided in the CHANGELOG.md file located at the root of the region's directory.

The authors are grateful for the input from dozens of local and international experts. A list of contributors can be found at https://www.globalquakemodel.org/risk-model-contributors.

If you make use of this work, please cite both the publication and the data.

Publications:

Yepes-Estrada, C., Calderon, A., Costa, C., Crowley, H., Dabbeek, J., Hoyos, M., Martins, L., Paul, N., Rao, A., Silva, V. (2023). Global Building Exposure Model for Earthquake Risk Assessment. Earthquake Spectra. doi:10.1177/87552930231194048

Data:

Yepes-Estrada, C., Baiguera, M., Calderon, A., Caruso, M., Costa, C., Gonzalez, D., Nafeh, A.M.B., Rao, A., Silva, V. (2026). Global Exposure Model (2026.0.0). doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8117363

• Africa: Paul et al. (2022)¹
• Australia: Dunford and Power (2014)²
• Canada: Journeay et al. (2022)³
• Central America: Calderon et al. (2022)⁴
• Central Asia: Pittore et al. (2020)⁵
• China: Ma et al. (2021)⁶
• Costa Rica: Calderon et al. (2019)⁷
• Europe: Crowley et al. (2020)⁸
• GED4GEM: Gamba et al. (2012)⁹
• India: Rao et al. (2020)¹⁰
• Iran: Motamed at al. (2019)¹¹
• Middle East: Dabbeek and Silva (2020)¹²
• New Zealand: Abbott et al. (2020)¹³
• Pacific Island Countries: PCRAFI initiative¹⁴
• South America: Yepes-Estrada et al. (2017)¹⁵
• Turkey: Rao et al. (2021)¹⁶
• United States: USACE (2023)¹⁷

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which requires:

• Attribution (you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made)
• Non-commercial (you may not use the material for commercial purposes)
• ShareAlike (derivatives created must be made available under the same license as the original)

If your use case deviates from the requirements of the offered license, but still want to explore the use of the data, please contact us at license@globalquakemodel.org

Any deviation from these terms incurs license infringement. For commercial use of the data contained within this work, a specific license agreement must be made tailored to your use case, in such instance please contact GEM at product@globalquakemodel.org.

By default you will see the files in the repository in the main branch. Each version of the model that is released is marked with a tag. By changing the tag version at the top of the repository, you can see the files for a given version.

Note that the main branch could contain the work-in-progress of the next version of the model.

For each version, a released zip file is available: release zip file downloads.

The building classes defined within this exposure model follow the GEM Building Taxonomy v4.0. The link provides additional details on taxonomy substrings, images and detailed description of each attribute.

Building classes are mapped to corresponding vulnerability functions available in the GEM's Global Vulnerability Model. Inside each country there is available a Vulnerability_mapping_ISO3.csv file useful for earthquake risk assessment using the OpenQuake engine.

Definitions and descriptions of the columns in the exposure summary tables.