Seismic Microzonation Study of South Asian Cities and Its Implications to Urban Risk Resiliency under Climate Change Scenario

Abstract

In this study, an attempt has been made to review the existing framework of earthquake risk resiliency for the urban agglomerates of South Asian earthquake-prone countries (Afghanistan; Bangladesh; Bhutan, India, and Pakistan) with aim of suggesting a plausible model for earthquake risk resiliency for urban agglomerates of the region under the influence of uncontrollable climate change scenario. We demonstrated that the existing infrastructures can be retrofitted to mitigate and reduce the nature and extent of damages to structures to the greater extent whilst site response based comprehensive seismic microzonation is very much required for new settlements and for long-term sustainable urban planning by adopting multi-disciplinary investigations using integrated tools consisted of geophysical, geological, and geotechnical methodologies, which in turn help understand how and why underneath sub-surface layers get amplified to cause destruction of buildings and severe damages to critical infrastructures of South Asian Cities. It is inferred that implementation of fourth level comprehensive seismic Micro, Nano, Pico and Femto zonation study for almost all strategic cities of South Asia is a need of an hour in particular, and of the seismically prone regions of the world, in general, which would be helpful for generating a series of new parameters for development of multi-dimensional risk resilient building design codes for the safer and sustainable infrastructures of urban settlement. The methodology has wide-scale applicability to different kinds of structures and typology of the buildings.