An innovative approach to assess and reduce the vulnerability of Nepal’s housing stock

With a large number of vulnerable houses, Nepal faces a huge risk from future earthquakes. While compliance with the national building codes is increasing for the new buildings, existing non-code-compliant buildings pose a huge threat to the occupants. It has been difficult to promote retrofitting of residential buildings in major urban and urbanizing cities across Nepal.

With support from the UNDP Asia Pacific Regional iData Initiative, UNDP Nepal utilized this massive dataset from the earthquake-affected region and prototyped a Vulnerability Scoring model that can be used to prioritize potentially vulnerable buildings for interventions to reduce their vulnerability.

The outcome of the prototyping suggests that, with a good level of confidence, this model can be applied to different municipalities to assess the vulnerability of existing housing stock to promote the interventions for risk reduction and mitigation focused on over 1.4 million mud-bonded houses which are the most vulnerable or the 1 million cement bonded houses. The study offers an innovative approach to addressing Nepal’s challenge through prioritizing buildings for retrofitting.

Also Read: Affordable and Sustainable Housing in Developing Counties by Using Vernacular Architecture