ALBERT

Description: To build disaster resilience, the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Mexico City’s Secretariat of Education, Science, Technology, and Innovation, supported a project to develop a digital platform to assess risk to natural hazards in Mexico City. This platform is based on a Geographical Information System (GIS) and its main purpose is to identify the associated risk to the following natural hazards: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, mass movement processes, forest fires, and land subsidence. Besides characterizing the local hazards for different return periods, social vulnerability was determined using thirteen indicators from data of the 2010 Mexican Census of Population and Housing. We recognize social vulnerability as those social conditions that make a community susceptible to be damaged by a hazard and it is an inherent characteristic of society. Population and critical facilities (hospitals, schools, telecommunications, etc.) were considered as exposed elements. “Social risk” is expressed using a qualitative spatial multi-criteria evaluation technique by superimposing the calculated GIS’s raster of the social vulnerability over individual hazard rasters. The resulting values measure the “likelihood of risk”. Both, vulnerability and hazard, were classified into five categories with values from 1 to 5, where 1 is low and 5 very high. As a result, we obtain a meshing array that reflects the likelihood of social risk for specific hazards. The main purpose of this tool is to provide local authorities elements for land use regulations and urban development by strengthening their prevention and mitigation actions.