Earthquakes are a serious threat for many European countries, particularly those around the Mediterranean Sea. In many cities exposed to high earthquake hazard, a substantial proportion of the population still lives in buildings that do not meet modern earthquake-resistant standards. Preventive actions, such as retrofitting of structures, are essential, but they are not sufficient and cannot be applied easily on a large scale. Real-time actions focussing on decreasing the physical vulnerability and exposure of populations are a viable way to reduce earthquake risk.

The primary objective of REAKT is to improve the efficiency of real-time earthquake risk mitigation methods and their capability of protecting structures, infrastructures and populations. REAKT aims to develop methodologies that will enhance the quality of information provided by earthquake forecasting, early warning and real-time vulnerability systems, as well as establishing best practices for how to use all of this information in a unified manner. In order to be used effectively, such information needs to be combined into a fully probabilistic framework, including realistic estimates of the uncertainties involved, that is suitable for decision making in real time. The REAKT consortium draws together most of the main European institutes and research groups, in addition to major non-European institutes, that are working on different aspects of earthquake early warning and probabilistic models of operational forecasting.

The project is divided into 7 scientific work packages that constitute a logical sequence from, at one end, the processes involved in earthquake generation and the physics of short-term seismic changes, to the other, the threatened people. through operational earthquake forecasting, early warning and rapid assessment of damage and vulnerability, decision making and capacity building, and the application of the developed methodologies to 12 strategic test cases.