Despite their much smaller individual contribution to the global counts of casualties and damage than their
larger counterparts, earthquakes with moment magnitudes Mw in the range 4.0-5.5 may dominate seismic
hazard and risk in areas of low overall seismicity, a statement that is particularly true for regions where
anthropogenically-induced earthquakes are predominant. With the risk posed by these earthquakes
causing increasing alarm in certain areas of the globe, it is of interest to determine what proportion of
earthquakes in this magnitude range that occur sufficiently close to population or the built environment do
actually result in damage and/or casualties. For this purpose, a global catalogue of potentially damaging
events—that is, earthquakes deemed as potentially capable of causing damage or casualties based on a
series of pre-defined criteria—has been generated and contrasted against a database of reportedly
damaging small-to-medium earthquakes compiled in parallel to this work. This paper discusses the criteria
and methodology followed to define such a set of potentially damaging events, from the issues inherent to
earthquake catalogue compilation to the definition of criteria to establish how much potential exposure is
sufficient to consider each earthquake a threat. The resulting statistics show that, on average, around 2% of
all potentially-damaging shocks were actually reported as damaging, though the proportion varies
significantly in time as a consequence of the impact of accessibility to data on damage and seismicity in
general. Inspection of the years believed to be more complete suggests that a value of around 4 to 5%
might be a more realistic figure.