Since 2015, the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation and its partners have been supporting regional programs and bilateral collaborations to develop an open global earthquake risk model. These efforts led to the development of a repository of probabilistic seismic hazard models, a global exposure dataset comprising structural and occupancy information regarding the residential, commercial and industrial buildings, and a comprehensive set of fragility and vulnerability functions for the most common building classes. These components were used to estimate probabilistic earthquake risk globally using the OpenQuake‐engine, an open‐source software for seismic hazard and risk analysis. This model allows estimating a number of risk metrics such as annualized average losses or aggregated losses for particular return periods, which are fundamental to the development and implementation of earthquake risk mitigation measures.

This paper focuses on the effects of the earthquake which struck the Abruzzo region (Central Italy) on April 6 2009, causing considerable damage to many ancient buildings, particularly churches. During the emergency after the earthquake, many churches and other historical monuments (towers, city walls, large town houses, etc.) were surveyed, according to first-level damage survey forms for Cultural Heritage buildings, by multidisciplinary working groups composed of experts from several Italian institutions (Universities, Ministry for Cultural Heritage, Fire Brigade, etc.). This paper presents a statistical study on the information collected by the University of Padova during the surveys, which was later inserted and organized in a database, and illustrates data on damage assessment of the buildings in question. It also presents an intuitive overview of the seismic effects on several churches, allowing not only better understanding of the response of these structures to this particular earthquake, but also correlating data on it with its effects on the churches

Recent earthquakes showed that the vulnerability of some RC buildings with masonry infill walls is high when subjected to seismic actions. During the design practice, the infills are commonly treated as non-structural elements, despite their recognised contribution to the structural response of the buildings. The safety assessment of this type of buildings is important and any detailed information is essential, since such information is needed for estimation of the losses that future earthquakes are likely to induce. The present study focuses on the observation and analysis of architectural and structural design drawings of 80 buildings that represent common RC buildings with masonry infill walls located in Portugal. The data were analysed with the purpose of estimating geometric properties of the masonry infill panels confined by RC frames. Fourteen-hundred masonry infill walls were observed and were divided in to different types according to the different dispositions of the openings. Several measurements were performed in order to have deeper knowledge about the percentage of openings that exist in masonry infill walls and consequently in the building’s façade. Infill panels’ dimensions were also determined and other parameters related to the general characteristics of the buildings and the structural elements were also analysed. Parameters such as beams’ and columns’ dimensions and reinforcement details or slab thickness were also analysed. The collected data are utilized to derive probabilistic distributions, whose goodness-of-fit are partially verified with a statistical test. The results from this study can be used in structural modelling development of nonlinear models for masonry infill panels or computation of fragility models. In addition, the statistical parameters such as mean values, standard deviations, probability density functions and their goodness-of-fit have also been investigated for all the entire parameters.