The purpose of this project was to model the world population distribution into building types
in three size categories of settlements: major urban, minor urban, and rural. With this dataset,
losses may be calculated for the population dataset with approximately 2 million settlements
contained in WAPMERR’s QLARM program, or for the LANDSCAN population data
defined in populated polygons. Because no detailed information on building stock exists for
many countries, we had to model their built environment by using data from neighboring
countries, which can be reasonably assumed to have similar properties. Because previous
groupings of countries were not realistic in all choices, we introduced new groupings. The
sources for building types were: 40% from census data, 25% from the WHE/PAGER project,
25% based on research, 9% based on UN reports, and 1% on HAZUS data. For modeling the
built environment separately in three settlement classes, we followed Satterthwaithe and used
2,000 and 20,000 people as limits for all countries. For the smallest and largest categories of
settlements, we use the distributions of people into PAGER construction types. The
distribution of people in the intermediate size settlements is calculated as average from the
largest and smallest categories. A comparison of the population estimated to be affected by a
recent M6.8 earthquake in Myanmar showed that the LANDSCAN urban polygon data
contain only half of the population known to be present, based on QLARM data. A report on
the origin of building and occupancy data for individual countries is provided under separate
cover as Appendix A, and the data themselves are contained in an attached excel-file as
Appendix B.