Approximate model for worldwide building stock in three size categories of settlements

Type Working Paper - Background Paper prepared for the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction
Title Approximate model for worldwide building stock in three size categories of settlements
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2013
URL http://www.preventionweb.net/english/hyogo/gar/2013/en/bgdocs/WAPMERR, 2012.pdf
Abstract
The purpose of this project was to model the world population distribution into building types in three size categories of settlements: major urban, minor urban, and rural. With this dataset, losses may be calculated for the population dataset with approximately 2 million settlements contained in WAPMERR’s QLARM program, or for the LANDSCAN population data defined in populated polygons. Because no detailed information on building stock exists for many countries, we had to model their built environment by using data from neighboring countries, which can be reasonably assumed to have similar properties. Because previous groupings of countries were not realistic in all choices, we introduced new groupings. The sources for building types were: 40% from census data, 25% from the WHE/PAGER project, 25% based on research, 9% based on UN reports, and 1% on HAZUS data. For modeling the built environment separately in three settlement classes, we followed Satterthwaithe and used 2,000 and 20,000 people as limits for all countries. For the smallest and largest categories of settlements, we use the distributions of people into PAGER construction types. The distribution of people in the intermediate size settlements is calculated as average from the largest and smallest categories. A comparison of the population estimated to be affected by a recent M6.8 earthquake in Myanmar showed that the LANDSCAN urban polygon data contain only half of the population known to be present, based on QLARM data. A report on the origin of building and occupancy data for individual countries is provided under separate cover as Appendix A, and the data themselves are contained in an attached excel-file as Appendix B.

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