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What is exposure or the elements at risk?

The exposure, or elements of a community at risk are influenced by the number of people, buildings and other infrastructure within an area and are essential to any risk assessment. Analysis of risk to a community requires the development of extensive datasets which define the most vulnerable components of communities. The data which provides the basis for vulnerability assessments and ultimately allows the determination of the potential impact of an event include:

• Building construction classifications and distributions;
• building codes, construction practices and costs;
• critical infrastructure such as roads, water, power, sewage, emergency facilities, hospitals etc;
• cadastre detailing land boundaries and ownership;
• census data on population distribution, income, and other statistics such as age, occupation, disability, education, etc;
• economic data on business sectors, industrial production, exports, imports etc; and
• emergency management arrangements for disaster response and recovery.