Abstract. Despite California being a highly seismic prone region, most homeowners are not covered against this risk. This study analyses the reasons for homeowners to purchase insurance to cover earthquake losses, with application in California. A dedicated database is built from 18 different data sources about earthquake insurance, gathering data since 1921. A new model is developed to assess the take-up rate based on the homeowners’ risk awareness and the average annual insurance premium amount. Results suggest that only two extreme situations would lead all owners to cover their home with insurance: (1) a widespread belief that a devastating earthquake is imminent, or alternatively (2) a massive decrease in the average annual premium amount by a factor exceeding 6 (from USD 980 to 160, 2015 US dollars). Considering the low likelihood of each situation, we conclude from this study that new insurance solutions are necessary to fill the protection gap.

A number of probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) maps have been released for Indonesia over the past few decades. This study proposes a method for testing PSHA maps using U.S. Geological Survey ShakeMap catalog considered as historical seismicity for Indonesia. It consists in counting the number of sites on rock soil for which the independent maximum peak ground acceleration (PGA) of the ShakeMap footprints between May 1968 and May 2018 exceeds the thresholds from the PSHA map studied and in comparing this number with the probability of exceedance given in the PSHA map. Although ShakeMap footprints are not as accurate and complete as continuous recorded ground motion, the spatially distributed ShakeMap covers 7,642,261 grid points, with a resolution of 1  km2, compensating the lack of instrumental data over this period. This data set is large enough for the statistical analysis of independent PGA values on rock sites only. To obtain the subdata set, we develop a new selection process and a new comparison method, considering the uncertainty of ShakeMap estimates. The method is applied to three PSHA maps (Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program [GSHAP], Global Assessment Report [GAR], and Standar Nasional Indonesia [SNI2017]) for a selection of sites first located in Indonesia and next only in the western part of the country. The results show that SNI2017 provides the best fit with seismicity over the past 50 yr for both sets of rock sites (whole country and western part only). At the opposite, the GAR and GSHAP seismic hazard maps only fit the seismicity observed for the set of rock sites in western Indonesia. This result indicates that this method can only conclude on the spatial scale of the analysis and cannot be extrapolated to any other spatial resolution.