An inventory of exposed assets is a key component of seismic risk assessment studies, together with hazard characterisation and vulnerability assessment. Recent research has brought significant advances on hazard analysis, e.g. Woessner et al. (2015), and fragility curves, e.g. Rossetto et al. (2014). However, detailed and reliable information on exposed structures to be used for large-scale seismic risk assessment is still not widely available. The collection of harmonised data at large scale, such as the European one, represents one of the major challenges in seismic risk assessment studies. For instance, data regarding national housing censuses in Europe are not completely harmonised across countries and significant efforts are required to collect and process census data to be further used in seismic risk studies. Buildings exposure data for seismic risk assessment have been collected at different spatial disaggregation levels, ranging from fine spatial scale surveys, focusing for instance on specific cities around Europe, e.g. Vicente et al. (2011), or on industrial infrastructures (Sousa et al. 2017b), to coarser spatial scale inventories, as in research projects like PAGER – Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response system (Jaiswal et al. 2010) – or NERA – Network of European Research Infrastructures for Earthquake Risk Assessment and Mitigation (Crowley et al. 2012). Information on the building stock has been also collected within the framework of projects aiming at assessing the energy performance of buildings, in such cases, aggregated at much larger areas with similar climatic conditions. Another source of detailed information on the building stock, albeit not fully harmonised across countries, are the national housing censuses. A review of several data sources revealed divergences and incompatibilities among them (Tsionis 2015), which raise questions on their aptness for use in the seismic loss estimation at large regions. Frequently the inventories compiled within research projects contain data aggregated at the level of countries, which is not sufficient for seismic risk assessment. Moreover, they are inferred from a variety of sources and they do not account for the distribution of buildings in small geographical units, which is proven to influence the loss estimates. [...] The aim of this report is to inventory the housing stock in the European Union (EU) and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) Member States, using georeferenced data, harmonised in terms of both procedures and variables collected. The harmonised database created in this study provides an overview of the vulnerability of the housing stock across Europe.
