Led by a group of researchers at the University of Bristol, BRACE project – standing for Building Bhutanese Resilience Against Cataclysmic Events – is an interdisciplinary try to help the Kingdom of Bhutan cope with earthquakes and their effects on the environment, business, infrastructure and society.
Bhutan lies to the east of Nepal, along the same seismically - active Himalayan belt. However, compared to Nepal, which was severely hit by the great M 7.8 earthquake in 2015, Bhutan hasn't experienced a major earthquake for quite some time. The country is not prepared to withstand a big seismic event, with the seismic risk being poorly understood by authorities, policy makers and the population. In case an earthquake hit the region at the moment, it would cause major disruption to the landscape and infrastructure, with consequent impacts on access to food, water, energy, and the wellbeing of the Bhutanese people, according to the research team of the University of Bristol.
BRACE is a foundation - building project, funded by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) as part of its Global Challenges Research Fund. Led by Dr. Frances Cooper from the School Of Earth Sciences of the University of Bristol, it aims to bring together a diverse group of researchers from Bhutan, the UK, and the USA (engineers, geoscientists, geographers, historians, archaeologists) along with policy makers, to address seismic risk and develop resilience - building strategies within Bhutan. Links between historical earthquake records, current seismic hazards, and the potential impacts of earthquakes on people, infrastructure, and the environment shall be investigated.
The project started on January 9, 2017 and will run for a year. Its end objective is to prepare the Kingdom of Bhutan before the next big earthquake strikes, by improving estimates of seismic hazard and risk, as well as risk governance amongst institutions, organizations and the private sector.
For more information on BRACE, visit the project's official website.
Source: University of Bristol
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