To achieve societies that are resilient to seismic hazard it is necessary to bring together communities from the physical sciences, engineering, the social sciences and end-users, to jointly develop the most useful representation of seismic hazard for societal decisions. The philosophies and methods of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) were first formalized by Cornell in 1968. In practice, the core components of PSHA have remained similar in the subsequent 50 years, but with increasing complexity in individual components. As communities focus on resilience, is current best-practice meeting these needs? Can methods be rethought to improve current best-practice? Is increasing complexity justified based on our knowledge of earthquake occurrence and the risk-based needs of decision makers and what is the role of the decision makers and other technical communities in designing how we estimate seismic hazard? As complexity increases, what is the trade-off with uncertainty and precision? Given the uncertainties in all modeling components, are the current outputs of PSHA the most effective way of communicating our understanding to end-users in the risk and decision making communities? Finally, can Smart Cities provide information to better quantify hazard in important urban areas around the globe? Various projects like the Belmont-Forum funded RESIST and EU-funded RISE are attempting to address these questions by rethinking how dynamic hazard and risk are and how they can be best communicated.
We invite presentations that explore these questions via: modeling methods; providing guidance on delivering more useful and relevant models; and cross-disciplinary actions with physical scientists, social scientists, engineers and decisions makers. Ultimately we aim to evolve seismic hazard modeling to meet the new challenges being defined to develop safer and more resilient communities.