Abstract:Medellín is the second largest city of Colombia with more than 2 million inhabitants according to the latest census and with more than 240,000 public and private buildings. It is located on an intermediate seismic hazard area according to the seismic hazard map of Colombia although no destructive earthquakes have recently occurred having as a consequence low seismic risk awareness among its inhabitants. Using the results of a fully probabilistic risk assessment of the city with a building by building resolution level and considering the dynamic soil response, average annual losses by sectors as well as casualties and other direct effects have been obtained and aggregated at county level. Using the holistic evaluation module of the multi-hazard risk assessment CAPRA platform, EvHo, a comprehensive assessment that considered the social fragility and lack or resilience at county level was performed making use of a set of indicators with the objective of capturing the aggravating conditions of the initial physical impact. The Urban Seismic Risk Index has been obtained at county level being useful to communicate risk to decision-makers and stakeholders besides making easy to identify potential zones that can be problematic in terms of several dimensions of the vulnerability. This case study is an example of how a multidisciplinary research on disaster risk reduction has helped to show how risk analysis can be of high relevance for decision-making processes in disaster risk management.

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Abstract. The existing disaster databases allow analyzing losses produced by previous events and assessing the risk to natural hazard in a similar way as the insurance industry does for vehicles, health, etc., if the conditions and trends are maintained. Among the existing disaster databases, we selected DesInventar whose vast majority of records correspond to "small" events; this selection is of special interest as these small events are often ignored because, individually, they only stroke a few assets accounting for low economic losses. Nevertheless, their accumulated effect can have a significant impact over the economic and fiscal sustainability of urban areas, regions or countries. Also, considering the difficulties involved in assessing risk for those small disasters, like the lack of general models and the elevated susceptibility to local variables of the results, this approach can give answers so far unavailable. The methodology herein proposed has been applied to the assessment of risk (in the terms of the loss exceedance curve) in 23 countries.