Assessing the impact of Syrian refugees on earthquake fatality estimations in southeast Turkey

Abstract

Abstract. The influx of millions of Syrian refugees into Turkey has rapidly changed the population distribution along the Dead Sea Rift and East Anatolian fault zones. In contrast to other countries in the Middle East where refugees are accommodated in camp environments, the majority of displaced individuals in Turkey are integrated into local cities, towns, and villages – placing stress on urban settings and increasing potential exposure to strong earthquake shaking. Yet, displaced populations are often unaccounted for in the census based population models used in earthquake casualty estimations. Accordingly, this study constructs a refugee inclusive gridded population model and analyzes its impact on semi-empirical casualty estimations across southeast Turkey. Daytime and nighttime fatality estimates were calculated for five geographically distributed fault zones at earthquake magnitudes 5.8, 6.4, and 7.0. Total casualty estimates ranged from 28–7723 individuals, with the contribution of refugees varying from 1 %–26 % of total estimated casualties. On average, these percentages correspond to casualty underestimations of tens to hundreds of individuals. These findings communicate the necessity of incorporating refugee statistics into earthquake risk analyses in southeast Turkey and the ongoing importance of placing environmental hazards in their appropriate regional and temporal context.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.