The capital city, Kathmandu, is the most developed and populated place in Nepal. The majority of the
administrative offices, headquarters, numerous historical monuments, and eight World Heritages sites
are in the Kathmandu Valley. However, this region is geologically located on lacustrine sediment
basin, characterized by a long history of destructive earthquakes. The past events resulted in great
damage of structures, losses of human life’s and property, and interrupted the social development.
Therefore, earthquake disaster management is one of the most serious issues in highly seismically
active regions such as the Kathmandu Valley. In recent years, the earthquake risk in this area has
significantly increased due to uncontrolled development, poor construction practices with no
earthquake safety consideration, and lack of awareness amongst the general public and government
authorities. In this context, this study explores the realistic situation of earthquake losses due to future
earthquakes in Kathmandu Valley. To this end, three municipalities: (a) Kathmandu metropolitan city
(KMC), (b) Lalitpur Sub-Metropolitan City (LSMC) and (c) Bhaktapur Municipality (BMC) are
selected for study. The earthquake loss estimation in the selected municipalities is performed through
the combination of seismic hazard, structural vulnerability, and exposure data. For what concerns the
seismic input, various earthquake scenarios considering four seismic sources in Nepal were adopted.
Regarding the exposure, data about the type of existing buildings, population, and ward level
distribution of building typologies is estimated from the recent national census survey of 2011.