Scira Menoni

In this article we will focus on the relevance of the nexus concept in the case of floods, with the aim of understanding what role water, food production and energy play in flood events, both in terms of potential driver of the risk itself and in terms of potentially affected systems. Water, energy and agriculture will be analysed as both potentially vulnerable targets and drivers of the flood hazard. In the final part of the chapter some general reflections related to the Nexus approach in general and its specific application in the Peri-Urban context to deal in particular with flood risk will be developed.

The paper aims at introducing the reader to vulnerability to earthquake in Istanbul based on the methodology developed within the ENSURE project 1 where Istanbul has been chosen as one of the external case study areas by the courtesy of Seda Kundak who collaborated within the POLIMI project team. The result given in this paper was attained in three stages. The first stage includes the primary results attained during the ENSURE project. The second stage started regarding to the request coming from the Italian Civil Protection and Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency in Turkey (AFAD in Turkish abbreviations) for implementing the ENSURE vulnerability assessment methodology in Istanbul. The second stage helped to indicate the missing data, as not all the data are available to allow parameters to be applied. Therefore, in the last stage, the missing data set was collected during the fieldwork in Istanbul in August 2012 and the focus moved into systemic vulnerability and accessibi...

Understanding the complexity of future volcanic impacts that can be potentially induced by the large variability of volcanic hazards and the multiple dimensions of vulnerability of the increasingly interdependent and interconnected societies, requires an in-depth analysis of past events. A structured and inclusive post-event impact assessment framework is proposed and applied for the evaluation of damage and disruption on critical infrastructures caused by the eruption of the Cordón Caulle volcano (Chile) in 2011–2012. This framework is built on the forensic analysis of disasters combined with the techniques of the root cause analysis that converge in a bow-tie tool. It consists of a fault tree connected to subsequent event trees to describe the causal order of impacts. Considering the physical and systemic dimensions of vulnerability, four orders of impact have been identified: i) the first order refers to the physical damage or the primary impact on a component of the critical inf...

. Evacuation planning and management represents a key aspect of volcanic crises because it can increase people protection as well as minimize the potential impact on the economy, properties, and infrastructure of the affected area. Assessment of evacuation scenarios that consider human and economic impact is best done in a pre-disaster context as it helps authorities develop evacuation plans and make informed decisions outside the highly stressful time period that characterizes crises. We present an agent-based simulation tool that assesses the effectiveness of different evacuation scenarios using Vulcano island (Italy) as a case study. Simulation results show that the overall time needed to evacuate people should be analysed together with the percentage of people evacuated as a function of time and that a simultaneous evacuation on Vulcano is more efficient than a staged evacuation. We also present a model to assess the economic impact of evacuation as a function of evacuation duration and starting period that reveals that an evacuation of Vulcano would cause significant economic impact to the tourism industry if lasting more than 3 months (in case it was initiated at the beginning of the visitor season) to 1 year (in case it was initiated at the end of the visitor season).

The paper offers a disaster risk management perspective to analyze the COVID-19 pandemic and to propose and assess non-pharmaceutical mitigation measures for the recovery phase. Three main aspects are tackled: (i) the need to take a scenario-based approach; (i) the need to propose more fine-tuned and context-sensitive mitigation measures, the effectiveness and the cost–benefit of which must be carefully appraised; (iii) better communication as a fundamental pillar of any mitigation measure. Evidence and ideas from the field of natural disasters and man-made technological incidents are applied to tackle the health risk posed by the SARS-COV 2 virus and its rapid spread according to a multi-disciplinary perspective that addresses the health-related challenges and the need to avoid societal and economic breakdown.

Disaster forensic investigation analyses the unfolding of a disaster and attempts to identify its multiple causes of damage which can lead to (i) improved disaster prevention and management from lessons learnt, and (ii) more effective mitigation measures in the aftermath of a disaster. The way in which damage data are collected after a flood event as well as the types of collected data influences their usability within forensic investigations. In order to explore whether or not existing data can be used for disaster forensic analysis, the European Project IDEA (Improving Damage assessments to Enhance cost-benefit Analyses) is investigating existing gaps in damage information so as to identify possible paths towards improving data quality. This paper focuses in detail on a forensic analysis of the interlinked damage to economic activities and infrastructure in the Severn floods of 2007 in the UK. Besides investigating the usability of existing data, this research investigated: (i) th...

The presentation is focused on a simple and crucial question for warning systems: are flood and hydrological modelling and forecasting helpful to manage flood events? Indeed, it is well known that a warning process can be invalidated by inadequate forecasts so that the accuracy and robustness of the previsional model is a key issue for any flood warning procedure. However,

Effective flood risk mitigation requires that the impacts of flood events would be much better and more reliably known than is currently the case. Available post flood damage assessments usually supply only a partial vision of the consequences of the floods as they typically respond to the specific needs of a particular stakeholder. Coherently, they generally focus (i) on particular items at risk, (ii) on a certain time window after the occurrence of the flood, (iii) on a specific scale of analysis or (iv) on the analysis of damage only without an investigation of damage mechanisms and root causes.<br><br> This paper responds to the necessity of a more integrated interpretation of flood events as the base to address the variety of needs arising after a disaster. In particular, a model is supplied to develop multi-purposes complete event scenarios. The model organizes available information in the post event according to five logical axes. This way, post-flood damage asses...

The interaction and the couple effects that may occur as induced and indirect consequences of any triggering hazard in metropolitan areas is one of the most important problems to be tackled during disasters, as the Kobe earthquake in 1995 showed very clearly. The analysis of direct, secondary and indirect effects of the Kobe earthquake suggests to substitute the concept of chain of losses and failures to the simple couple hazardous event-damages which is currently used. Not only parameters related to physical weakness or strength of the built environment should be considered by scientists, experts and decision-makers. Organisational, social, and systemic factors are equally crucial to understand the magnified dimension of disasters at increasing levels of exposed systems vulnerability. Linking failures due to different kinds of vulnerability one to the other permits to reconstruct complete event scenarios, where social and organisational elements are not simply added to the 'hard' components of cities, but contribute to explain why failures and losses occurred and why it took so long to repair them. Lifeline damage assessment provides a good example to show how physical, organisational and systemic vulnerabilities are intimately connected one to the other. The point of view from which governance problems related to prevention and emergency preparedness will be looked at is that of an urban and regional planner. When planners look for design solutions suitable for a specific town or region, they must constantly bridge between hard technical matters and social and economical concerns. Furthermore, they are forced to consider in their projects spatial and geographic dimensions. Those two typical features of planners' approach to problem solving can be interesting for scholars in the field of risk assessment and mitigation research.

ABSTRACT Despite decades of research, flood loss estimation is still a challenging task. Drawing on recent research, a number of major problems can be identified among them the question of what specific damages under what circumstances are seen as significant? It is sensible that people would choose risk management strategies according to their capacity to reduce significant damages, disregarding those ones which mainly influence losses not seen as significant. The question arises as to what damage is significant when? The paper proposes and tests a model for assessing significance through case studies in Australia and Italy. Despite the explorative nature of this paper, results provide evidence for (i) the importance of its systematic analysis, as a first step of damage assessment as well as (ii) the need for a deeper knowledge of significance.

Nell’articolo il rapporto tra sistemi di accessibilità (ferroviaria e stradale) e grandi rischi viene affrontato da due diverse prospettive. La prima vede tali sistemi come esposti e vulnerabili a diverse forme di pericolosità naturale; la seconda li considera invece quali potenziali fonti di pericolo, indagando in particolare il trasporto di sostanze pericolose. Per quanto riguarda la prima parte dell’articolo, ovvero l’analisi di vulnerabilità delle infrastrutture di trasporto a diversi agenti naturali, verranno esplicitati i fattori di vulnerabilità fisica, sistemica e organizzativa. A sostegno della modellazione proposta, si fa riferimento sia alla letteratura internazionale sia al metodo sviluppato presso il Politecnico di Milano, nei suoi ultimi sviluppi. Interessa infatti presentare un metodo relativamente semplice da utilizzare a scala vasta per poi scendere nel dettaglio necessario laddove le priorità individuata a grande scala ne indichino la necessità. Tra i fattori di vu...

The presentation is focused on a simple and crucial question for warning systems: are flood and hydrological modelling and forecasting helpful to manage flood events? Indeed, it is well known that a warning process can be invalidated by inadequate forecasts so that the accuracy and robustness of the previsional model is a key issue for any flood warning procedure. However,

Mitigation measures are those aimed at reducing the potential harm to people and damage to the built and natural environments resulting from natural extremes. Various actions, ranging from hazard mapping to structural and non-structural measures, to insurance and legislation have been proposed as components of risk mitigation