Harmonizing seismicity information in Central Asian countries: earthquake catalogue and active faults

Abstract

Central Asian countries, which include Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, are known to be highly exposed to natural hazards, particularly earthquakes, floods, and landslides. With the aim of enhancing financial resilience and risk-based investment, planning to promote disaster and climate resilience in Central Asia, the European Union, in collaboration with the World Bank and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), launched the Strengthening Financial Resilience and Accelerating Risk Reduction in Central Asia (SFRARR) regional programme. Within this framework, a consortium of national and international scientific institutions was established and tasked with developing a regionally consistent multi-hazard and multi-asset probabilistic risk assessment. The overall goal was to improve scientific understanding on local perils and to provide local stakeholders and governments with up-to-date tools to support risk management strategies. However, the development of a comprehensive risk model can only be done with the basis of an accurate hazard evaluation, the reliability of which depends significantly on the availability of local data and direct observations. This paper describes the preparation of the input datasets required for the implementation of a probabilistic earthquake model for the Central Asian countries. In particular, it discusses the preparation of a new regional earthquake catalogue harmonized between countries and homogenized in moment magnitude (Mw), as well as the preparation of a regional database of selected active faults with associated slip rate information to be used for the construction of the earthquake source model. The work was carried out in collaboration with experts from the local scientific community, whose contribution proved essential for the rational compilation of the two harmonized datasets.