International Commission on Earthquake Forecasting for Civil Protection - ICEF

Under the ordinance n. 3757 (April 21, 2009) issued by the President of the Council of Ministers of Italy, Dr. Guido Bertolaso, the head of the Dipartimento della Protezione Civile (DPC), appointed an International Commission on Earthquake Forecasting for Civil Protection (here referred to as “the Commission” or ICEF) to:

1. Report on the current state of knowledge of short-term prediction and forecasting of tectonic earthquakes.

2. Indicate guidelines for utilization of possible forerunners of large earthquakes to drive civil protection actions, including the use of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis in the wake of a large earthquake.

Appointed to the Commission were geoscientists from China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States with wide experience in earthquake forecasting and prediction. Chair of the Commission is Prof. Thomas H. Jordan, Director of the Southern California Earthquake Centre and Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.

The Commission started their works on May 12, 2009, and reported its findings and recommendations on October 2, 2009. On May 30, 2011, the Commission presented to the DPC an extended final report on the topics listed above.

We do not present here the Italian translation of the final report because, due to the complexity of the topics adressed and the difficulty to carry out a punctual translation of the scientific terms used, we preferred not to provide an imprecise text that could allow misinterpretations of the original contents as thought by the authors.