The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Buildings, bridges, schools and public facilities make up most of the value at risk in a city and most of the deaths in earthquakes and many storms. Their safety depends on design codes, construction quality, maintenance and the condition of older stock. This page sets out how built assets fail, how their condition and vulnerability are assessed, and what evidence serves the authorities and owners responsible for them.
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
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Building safety is the capacity of buildings, bridges, schools and other built assets to withstand hazard loads without endangering occupants. It depends on design codes, enforcement, construction quality and maintenance. Older and non-engineered stock carries most vulnerability, and occupancy determines the consequences of failure.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Urban assets and housing · Lifeline system A · Register v5
| SS-12 | Electricity | Tier 1 | Flood 1-in-100 | 14 |
| WTW-2 | Water | Tier 1 | Flood 1-in-100 | 12 |
| DX-1 | Telecom | Tier 2 | Heat | 6 |
| H-Campus | Health | Tier 1 | Earthquake | 77 |
| PN-3 | Transport | Tier 2 | Storm surge | n/a |
red: SS-12 and its dependants
Buildings, heat and climate exposures. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Buildings designed before current codes, or built without engineering, carry most of the vulnerability. Retrofit is costly and slow, so the old stock remains for decades.
Building codes reduce risk where plans are checked and construction is inspected. Informal construction and weak enforcement leave new buildings as vulnerable as old ones.
Corrosion, water damage, alterations and lack of maintenance weaken structures over time. Bridges and public buildings without regular inspection lose safety margins unseen.
Schools, hospitals and dense housing hold many people at once. The same structural failure has far greater consequences where occupancy is high.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Building code | A set of legal requirements for the design and construction of buildings to protect safety and health. |
| Seismic retrofit | Strengthening an existing structure to improve its performance in earthquakes. |
| Exposure model | A database of assets with their type, value and occupancy used to estimate risk. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buildings by construction type and age | count by class | per inventory update | Building inventories and cadastres | OFFICIAL |
| Schools assessed for hazard safety | percent of schools | annual | School safety programmes | REPORTED |
| Bridges in poor condition | percent of inspected bridges | annual | Bridge inspection records | OBSERVED |
| Building permits with structural review | percent of permits | annual | Local permit records | REPORTED |
| Buildings retrofitted | count per year | annual | Retrofit programme records | REPORTED |
| Population in high-vulnerability building classes | people | per assessment | Exposure models | MODELLED |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| Global Earthquake Model exposure and vulnerability models | Building exposure and fragility by class | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for public models (to check) |
| Global Human Settlement Layer (JRC) | Built-up area, building height and settlement classification | Open, CC BY 4.0 |
| OpenStreetMap building footprints | Building outlines and some attributes | Open, ODbL |
| National bridge inventories | Bridge condition ratings, such as the US National Bridge Inventory | Public records, licence per government |
| Comprehensive School Safety Framework resources | School safety assessment approaches | Public, terms per publisher (to check) |
Critical Infrastructure prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Building regulators and local governments | Which code changes and enforcement to prioritise | Permit review records; vulnerability profiles |
| Ministries of education and public works | Which schools and public buildings to retrofit first | Safety screening; occupancy and hazard evidence |
| Road and bridge agencies | Which bridges to inspect, repair or replace | Condition summaries |
Urban exposure is concentrated and uneven. Dense areas place many people and assets in the same hazard footprint, and informal or older housing often offers less protection. Heat is a growing concern: buildings with poor ventilation, high thermal mass in hot climates or no cooling can become dangerous, and loss of power during a heatwave removes the protection that air conditioning provides. Urban heat islands, created by paved surfaces and limited vegetation, raise temperatures further.
Flooding damages buildings and contents and makes homes uninhabitable, while earthquakes test structural design. In each case, housing recovery depends on lifeline restoration, construction capacity, insurance and finance. Displacement can last long after utilities return, with social and economic effects that extend for years.
Urban form and planning are studied with Cities and Built Environment.
Building inventories combined with hazard models, drawing on structural and earthquake engineering, estimate likely damage.
Building physics models assess indoor temperatures during heatwaves with and without power.
Studies of past events trace how long housing recovery took and what constrained it.
Building inventories are often incomplete, especially for informal settlements. Damage models carry wide uncertainty, and social factors in recovery are hard to quantify.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.