Introduction

This chapter starts with an overview of seismic risk to society. It discusses the causes of earthquakes and the impacts they can have, including loss of life or severe injury, direct economic losses, and the loss of building functionality. It then presents the case for seismic retrofit and some of the challenges in improving the resilience of existing building stocks.

The structure of the book is outlined, and emphasis is placed on its focus towards practising engineers. Additional existing literature that is relevant to seismic assessment and retrofit, and may be useful to read in conjunction with the current book, is discussed.