The cases of the recent destructive earthquakes that occurred in Sichuan (China, 2008), Italy (2009), Haiti (2010), and Chile (2010) have shown that the present state of seismological research can do little or almost nothing in the implementation of short- and medium-term earthquake forecasts, which would be useful for disaster mitigation measures.

This regrettable situation could be ascribed to the poor level of the present achievements on earthquake forecast. In fact, although many methods have been claimed to be capable of predicting earthquakes, the problem of formulating such predictions in a quantitative, rigorous, and repeatable way is still open. In the last decade some short-term forecasting models have been proposed in a way that can provide us with the estimate of earthquake occurrence probability in the space of their origin time, epicentral coordinates, and magnitude, and they have been successfully tested in forward-retrospective way against past seismic activity. However, it seems that these applications are still far away from our practical purposes.

On the other side, another problem of practical implementation of earthquake forecasting could also come from the lack of common understanding and exchange of information between the scientific community and the authorities responsible for earthquake damage mitigation in each country: they operate in two different environments, they aim for different tasks, and they generally speak two different languages. It is clear that the formulation of earthquake forecasts in probabilistic terms, with large uncertainties in space and time and very low probability levels, is still unusable for decision-making people. In real circumstances the authorities deal with critical problems related to the high cost of evacuating the population from the area where the scientific methods estimate an expected rate of destructive earthquake as one in many thousands days, while they would need much more deterministic statements.

For this special issue of the International Journal of Geophysics, we aim to assess the state of the art of earthquake forecasts and their applicability. Therefore, we invite papers reporting methods and case studies that can concretely contribute to improving the present frustrating situation, regarding the practical use of earthquake forecasts. In this aspect, we intend to accept only papers on forecast methods that can be quantitatively defined and tested, as well as papers dealing with models by which earthquake forecasts can be reasonably transferred in measures for disaster mitigation.

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijgp/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: