Global Seismic Prevention Index: A Quantitative Comparative Assessment of Earthquake Risk Mitigation in 12 High-Risk Countries

Abstract Earthquake impacts vary dramatically across countries experiencing comparable seismic hazard, indicating that prevention capacity plays a fundamental role in shaping human and economic losses. In this study, we introduce the Global Seismic Prevention Index (GSPI), a composite and reproducible metric designed to quantify national seismic prevention capacity across seven structural, institutional, and societal domains, including building code enforcement, early warning systems, urban planning, governance, preparedness, retrofitting, and exposure–vulnerability profiles. The GSPI is applied to 12 earthquake-prone countries using harmonized global datasets spanning 1970–2024, integrating earthquake impacts from the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT), seismic parameters from the USGS, and population and economic baselines from the World Bank. To evaluate real-world consequences, three normalized impact indicators are computed: Fatality Rate (FR), Casualty Efficiency (CE), and Damage-to-GDP ratio (DG). Results reveal distinct descriptive groupings of prevention capacity across countries, while principal component analysis identifies a dominant pattern of covariation among the seven GSPI domains. The GSPI provides a robust framework for benchmarking prevention architectures and diagnosing structural weaknesses in seismic governance. The findings highlight the need for event-level and time-resolved analyses to isolate prevention effects and support evidence-based disaster risk reduction policies.