Catastrophe risk company celebrates a decade of helping the world understand earthquake risk.
By Megan Sever, Editor-in-chief, Temblor Earth News
On December 17, 2024, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake devastated Vanuatu’s capital city, Port Vila, killing 14 people in the South Pacific island nation. Less than two weeks later, the government received a $1.2 million payment from a new earthquake insurance policy that had been enacted November 1, thanks in part to Temblor, Inc., and our partners, the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Insurance Company and the World Bank. This is one of many ways Temblor serves the global community: helping to develop earthquake risk models that governments and insurance companies can use to forecast earthquake risk.
Raising awareness of seismic risk has been Temblor’s mission since it was founded 10 years ago by CEO Ross Stein and CTO Volkan Sevilgen. The idea for the company began when Stein and his wife visited a school in Kenya that she had helped build through a nonprofit. Seeing a fault scarp next to the school, Stein realized that the school was built on a fault. Stein, who was awarded the Paul G. Silver Award for Outstanding Scientific Service from the American Geophysical Union in 2024, and Sevilgen had been working together at the U.S. Geological Survey at the time. They left to build an app that allows people visualize their own seismic risk: Enter an address anywhere in the world, and the app tells you what your risk is.
The company quickly grew to include developing advanced, independently tested catastrophe models that provide an unbiased and transparent assessment of risk. Temblor’s products include dynamic hazard and loss forecasts after large earthquakes; the first globally consistent insurance loss model; stochastic event sets; and the highest-resolution global site amplification model available today. Temblor’s clients and partners include the World Bank, national governments, insurance and reinsurance companies, insurance-linked security companies and investment companies. But Temblor’s reach goes far beyond business and government. Temblor provides both its clients and the public with accurate, accessible, and understandable information about earthquakes. Temblor Earth News publishes breaking earthquake news, in-depth analyses, and expert reporting on the latest developments in natural hazards research. The hundreds of articles Temblor has published over the last few years are written by scientists, science journalists, and leading international researchers, as well as Temblor’s cofounders and scientists. Meanwhile, Stein and Sevilgen have appeared dozens of times on news reports around the world, explaining earthquakes and seismic risk to the public.
Whether through an app, risk models and assessments, or articles, webinars, presentations and videos for the public, Stein and Sevilgen and the rest of the global Temblor team continue their goal to rid the world of the excuse “I didn’t know” when looking at potential earthquake risk.
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