Earthquakes cause great human suffering and economic damage, leading to the loss of millions of lives and at a cost of billions of dollars. This five-year project aims to build resilience in earthquake-prone regions through three overarching objectives:

• To increase transformational knowledge of primary and secondary earthquake hazards.
• To identify pathways to resilience in populations exposed to these hazards.
• To build networks and partnerships to secure these gains over the long term.

EwF takes a transdisciplinary approach to helping communities build resilience. It brings together earth scientists, who specialise in earthquake hazard, and social scientists, who specialise in community vulnerability and resilience to earthquakes.

Our role is to bring these two groups together with other influential actors, such as governments and NGOs, to ensure the research is useful and to help translate the results into policy and practice.

Funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), EwF is part of the wider programme Increasing Resilience to Natural Hazards. It is a collaboration between natural scientists in Oxford and Cambridge, social scientists at Durham and Hull, and ODI's Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme.

In China, EwF is collaborating with Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Tongli International College, World Vision and Gender Development Solutions.

In Nepal, EwF is collaborating with the National Society for Earthquake Technology and the Nepalese Risk Reduction Consortium.