Afghanistan sits on active fault lines where major earthquakes strike on a regular basis, yet the country has almost no capacity to monitor seismic activity or warn its people of impending disasters.
“We do not have the capacity to do monitoring of earthquakes in Afghanistan. We never had it,” says Najibullah Kakar. As an Afghan Geohazard researcher working with international earthquake monitoring networks he analyses earthquake data from his office at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, the national research centre for Earth sciences in Germany. Najibullah Kakar has a background in working with monitoring and evaluation, and disaster risk reduction programs for the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (NAC) in Afghanistan.
Only One Station Active
At the moment, Afghanistan has just one functioning seismic station, located at Kabul University and installed by GFZ’s research centre in 2005. Three other stations that were supported by the United States Geological Survey have been deactivated in recent years due to sanctions. The cost of reactivating the stations would, however, be minimal. Basic seismic monitoring equipment costs from six to seven hundred dollars. “It takes maybe an hour or two hours of work to activate a station”, says Kakar.
Without proper monitoring, Afghanistan cannot detect the smaller earthquakes that often precede major ones. “All these important smaller earthquakes – foreshocks – that happen before and after the main earthquake give us vital information, which is missing for Afghanistan,” says Kakar.
Early Warning to Save Lives
As an earthquake-prone country, Afghanistan would greatly benefit from developing an early warning system. This could be achieved through the installation of active seismic stations that provide real-time information monitored 24/7 by specialists who would locate earthquakes and inform the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority (ANDMA), the relevant coordinating, body when the magnitude is large, enabling them to coordinate a response as quickly as possible, especially as the first hours of response are the most critical.
The centre could also detect a large number of foreshocks before the main earthquake happens, which could serve as a warning for local authorities to begin their preparations. This early warning system could collect relevant data and prepare for future seismic events by providing early-warning earthquake hazard maps and maps for other hazards such as landslides, rockfalls, and glacier lake outburst flood (GLOF) events, etc. These combined capabilities will support local disaster risk preparadness and response infrastructure in Afghanistan, and through long-term development, communities will have greater opportunities to receive timely warnings through various media.
Limited Government Capacity
The responsibility for monitoring earthquakes in Afghanistan falls to the Afghanistan Geological Survey, which has its own fully equipped seismology department. The main thing that is missing, are qualified seismologists with the capacity to analyse and process the data. Despite technological advances, the necessary geophysical education is currently unavailable in Afghan universities. Most of the few Afghan specialists with the necessary training have left Afghanistan, deepening the expertise gap. “What they can do at the moment is to report the data gathered from the U.S. Geological Services (USGS) or the German Geological Services (GFZ) that is available online”, says Kakar. This data is also shared with ANDMA (the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority)”.
This means that currently in Afghanistan, there is limited institutional capacity to perform critical tasks such as seismic risk assessments, development of hazard maps, or provision of early warning, and emergency response, with little opportunity to build lasting, local expertise or resilience.
Impact on Communities
The lack of monitoring and preparedness has direct consequences for Afghan communities. A pertinent example is the lack of safe building standards. Without proper risk assessment, “everyone is building whatever they want in whatever material they get. The cheaper, the better,” says Kakar. Without maps and data being available to responsible authorities, relevant regulations cannot be enacted.
Kakar points out that while data gathering from the monitoring stations can be done from abroad, there is a need for seismologists to be present in Afghanistan to interact on a daily basis with relevant authorities to assist in developing relevant policies. Activating more stations combined with cross-border cooperation would ensure better results in the long run.
Solutions for Future Preparedness
Najib Kakar suggests that with proper funding, the situation could improve relatively quickly. In spite of the current lack of a high level of academic capacity in seismology in Afghanistan, there is enough basic knowledge among Afghan academics who would need only a few months of training to understand how to process the data made available. That would be a start, according to Kakar.
International donors allocating more funds towards national and sub-national capacity building and awareness raising, would be greatly beneficial. The work could potentially be conducted through humanitarian response channels as these channels offer good potential for (re)activating the seismic stations.
As Afghanistan awaits its next inevitable major earthquake, the country remains largely blind to the seismic activity beneath its feet, with communities unprepared for disasters that follow predictable patterns but strike without warning.
Since 1900, Afghanistan has experienced approximately 100 earthquakes that caused significant damage. Recent disasters include a magnitude 6 earthquake in 2022 that claimed 1,000 lives, and a series of quakes in 2023 that killed another 1,000 people and levelled entire villages. A massive 7.5 magnitude earthquake in 2015 killed 399 people across Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The deadliest period came in 1998, when two earthquakes struck within three months, killing 2,300 people in the first event and 4,700 in the second. The most recent earthquake, in September 2025. has killed an estimated 2.200 at a minimum, but the full extent of casualties and destruction has not yet been determined.
Recommendations to Afghan authorities:
- Facilitate scientific education and research: Enable and support scientific education and research initiatives, recognising their vital importance for societal development and disaster preparedness.
- Strengthen institutional capacity: Allocate sufficient funding and resources to responsible departments to enhance their technical capabilities and operational effectiveness.
Recommendations to donors:
- Invest in capacity building and knowledge preservation: Support training programs for existing academics who require only months of specialised training to process seismic data effectively, while ensuring preservation of current expertise.
Facts about earthquakes in Afghanistan:
- At least 355 earthquakes of magnitude greater than 5.0 have struck Afghanistan since 1990.
- Earthquakes are the deadliest of Afghanistan’s natural disasters, killing about 560 people on average each year and causing annual damages estimated at $80 million.
- Afghanistan’s eastern and northeastern regions face the highest earthquake risk, particularly areas bordering Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
- Kabul city faces the highest earthquake-related damage costs, with an average of $17 million in losses annually.
- Afghanistan’s frequent earthquakes typically result from the Indian plate pushing northward into the Eurasian plate.
(Source: Reuters)
