The building exposure database includes a comprehensive inventory of residential, commercial, public and industrial buildings, consisting of their location, structural characteristics that affect the vulnerability to the effects of natural disasters, and replacement costs. Sophisticated methodologies were adopted for (1) identifying the spatial distribution of buildings in each country, (2) estimating building characteristics, and (3) assessing their unit replacement costs. Raw building datasets, which included approximately 80,000 field surveyed buildings across 11 countries, was critically analyzed and thoroughly processed to develop the building exposure database. The spatial location of buildings for all populated areas of each 15 PIC was assembled with a high level of resolution that balance accuracy and economy. In general, buildings were either (1) manually digitized from high-resolution satellite imagery and surveyed in the field (coverage: PG, TO, VU, TV, SB, WS, CK, FJ, KI, PW, and FM), (2) manually digitized from high-resolution satellite imagery but not field verified (coverage: All 15 countries), (3) inferred using image processing techniques and/or census data (coverage: PG, FJ, KI, SB, TL, VU, FM, MH, and, to a lesser extent, SB, CK, TO, and TV), or (4) extracted from datasets acquired from government sources. Compiled by AIR Worldwide.
