International Commission on Earthquake Forecasting for Civil Protection - ICEF

Founding and Composition
The International Commission on Earthquake Forecasting for Civil Protection (ICEF) was established under Article 6 of Order No. 3757 of the President of the Council of Ministers, dated April 21, 2009.

The members of the Commission were geoscientists from China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States with wide experience in earthquake forecasting and prediction. Chair of the Commission is Prof. Thomas H. Jordan, Director of the Statewide California Earthquake Center (SCEC) and Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.

Tasks
The Commission was appointed by Guido Bertolaso, Head of the Civil Protection Department until November 2010, and tasked with:

1. Reporting on the current state of knowledge of short-term prediction and forecasting of tectonic earthquakes.

2. Indicating guidelines for utilization of possible forerunners of large earthquakes to drive civil protection actions, including the use of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis in the wake of a large earthquake.

Outcomes
The Commission started their works on May 12, 2009, and reported its findings and recommendations on October 2, 2009. On May 30, 2011, the Commission presented to the DPC an extended final report on the topics listed above.

We do not present here the Italian translation of the final report because, due to the complexity of the topics adressed and the difficulty to carry out a punctual translation of the scientific terms used, we preferred not to provide an imprecise text that could allow misinterpretations of the original contents as thought by the authors.