Despite the extensive literature related to earthquakes, an effective method to forecast and avoid occasional seismic hazards that cause substantial damage is lacking. The Sun has recently been identified as a potential precursor to earthquakes, although no causal relationship between its activity and the Earth’s seismicity has been established. This study was aimed at investigating whether such a relationship exists and whether it can be used to improve earthquake forecasting. The edit distances between earthquake point processes were combined with delay-coordinate distances for sunspot numbers. The comparison of these two indicated the existence of unidirectional causal coupling from solar activity to seismicity on Earth, and a radial basis function regressor showed accuracy improvements in the largest magnitude prediction of next days by 2.6%–17.9% in the odds ratio when sunspot distances were included.
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