Speaker
Description
Italy is highly vulnerable to seismic hazards, with historical earthquakes causing substantial casualties and economic losses. Despite this, Italian seismic risk management has traditionally prioritized post-disaster recovery instead of effective urban prevention strategies.
This approach carries significant costs, profoundly affecting territorial functionality and local communities through losses, service interruptions, population and business displacement, and socio-cultural imbalances. Therefore, the speed of recovery plays a critical role in determining whether communities choose to rebuild or relocate permanently. Effective disaster risk reduction policies centered on urban prevention strategies to safeguard territorial safety are needed to accelerate post-earthquake recovery and enhance urban resilience.
In this work, we introduced the Early Recovery System (ERS) framework that identifies essential urban elements such as emergency functions, healthcare facilities, schools, road networks, areas for temporary housing, and interfering buildings with the potential for seismic retrofitting. By calculating 18 indicators over different time intervals and across three hypothetical scenarios, we generated recovery curves that illustrate urban functionality loss and recovery trajectories, to establish the optimal prevention strategy to be adopted. Evaluation of the ERS framework in the case study of L’Aquila post-2009 earthquake demonstrates its potential to mitigate long-term urban functional disruptions and facilitate faster recovery.
ERS may represent a further step towards constructing an urban seismic prevention instrument for early recovery, that could support decision-makers in planning interventions and setting priorities based on common goals of territorial safety in earthquake-prone regions.
References
Anelli, A., Mori, F., Mendicelli, A., & Bramerini, F. (2022). Mapping urban limit conditions in the perspective of disaster risk prevention and land management. Italian Journal of Geosciences, 141(2). https://doi.org/10.3301/IJG.2022.11
Coppola, A., G., Di Giovanni & Fontana, C. (2021) Prolific, but undemanding. The state and the post-disaster reconstruction of a small regional capital: the case of L’Aquila, Italy. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, DOI:10.1080/04353684.2021.1944816
Cutter, S. L., Ash, K. D., & Emrich, C. T. (2014) The geographies of community disaster resilience. Global Environmental Change, 29, 65-77.
FEMA - Federal Emergency Management Agency (2021). Recommended option for improving the built environment for post-earthquake reoccupancy, and functional recovery time. Special Publication FEMA P-2090/NIST SP-1254.
Li, Lianyan, Chang-Richards, A., Boston, M., Elwood, K., Hutt, C.M. (2023) Post-disaster functional recovery of the built environment: A systematic review and direction for future research. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 95, 103899.
Zhang, J., Zhang, M., & Li, G. (2021) Multi-stage composition of urban resilience and the influence of pre-disaster urban functionality on urban resilience. Natural Hazards, 107, 447–473.
| Keywords | Seismic risk prevention; Early recovery; Urban functionality assessment; |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
