ABSTRACT
The paper begins with a discussion of the facts of disasters, expanding the facts to include disasters and losses in the last five decades around the world and then shifting the focus from the lessons learned from recent earthquake disasters and reasons for increasing losses to urban disaster risk management requirements. A data matching earthquake loss estimation model is presented by linking together the input data, output data and the methodology of the earthquake loss estimation to address the challenge of creating urban disaster risk management tools to mitigate earthquake disasters. The paper concludes with some recommendations for improvement of earthquake loss estimation and earthquake risk management.
