Earthquakes are the deadliest natural hazard. Developing tools and measures to reduce future human and economic losses is the aim of RISE. RISE stands for Real-time earthquake rIsk reduction for a reSilient Europe and is a three-year project financed by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission. It started in September 2019 and will end in August 2022. RISE is coordinated by ETH Zurich, it brings together 19 organisations from across Europe and five international partners.

Recently, Laura Gulia investigated the spatio-temporal evolution of the earthquake size distribution throughout a seismic sequence focusing on the b-value. This is a parameter characterizing the relationship between the earthquake magnitude and the number of earthquakes. She and her colleagues found out that, immediately after a mainshock, the b-value increases by 20%-30% and remains high for at least the following 5 years, reducing the chance of occurrence of a larger earthquake near the fault that originated the mainshock.