Improving seimic hazard assessment in the Mediterranean Region

This paper is intended as a short presentation of the main limitations affecting seismic hazard
assessment, revisiting possible methods available in the literature to be applied for this purpose.
The convergence of the African Plate with the Eurasian Plate is the cause of the high seismic
activity characterizing the Mediterranean region, with particular intensity in its eastern part. It is
clear that the associated seismic risk requires appropriate measures for its mitigation. Seismic risk,
the amount of resources that the community is expected to pay to earthquakes in the long term, is
the product of three factors, such as seismic hazard, vulnerability and value of the exposed goods.
As earthquakes cannot be prevented, seismic risk can be mitigated by improving our knowledge
of seismic hazard, which is largely based on statistical analysis of historical earthquake catalogs.
Nevertheless, historical records are affected by problems of reliability, completeness and shortness,
as they commonly span time lengths of the same order of magnitude or even shorter than the
inter-event time of the strongest earthquakes produced by specific seismic sources. In this respect,
alternative methods can be proposed for integrating and improving our knowledge of seismogenic
processes, and estimating both time-independent and time-dependent occurrence rates of strong
earthquakes. We propose the application of physics-based earthquake simulators, requiring the
knowledge of a robust geological-geophysical seismogenic model.

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