The rapid urbanisation of cities alongside and on top of poorly characterised faults that are has resulted in large populations being exposed to a potentially large hazard. I am leading a recently funded project called Seismic Cities which will attempt to develop a blueprint to better tackle the question and improvement of resilience to earthquakes in megacities.

Seismic Cities is an inter-disciplinary research project funded by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) as part of its Global Challenges Research Fund. The long-term aim of the project is to address the sustainable cities and communities challenge in urban regions prone to earthquake hazard and runs for the period of 2017. It involves a range of academics form both the UK and Chile. More can be found out on teh project webpage: http://www.seismic-cities.org