A fast assessment methodology for screening of local civil protection plans on a territorial scale basis: A case study of an Italian province

Abstract

Local Civil Protection planning is a key aspect of the emergency preparedness, resulting to be strategic for all phases of Disaster Risk Management. The Civil Protection plan is the instrument allowing authorities to coordinate and implement actions to protect people, dwellings and infrastructures when a disaster occurs. In Italy, law 100 of July 12th, 2012, enforced municipalities to draw up Civil Protection plans. As a consequence, a large number of municipalities outsourced the work to external practitioners without a real shared cooperation, resulting in most of the plans to be methodological and poorly operational. Today in Italy the 88% of the municipalities have formally adopted an Civil Protection plan, but their operability and applicability can be barely assessed by territorial civil protection authorities. In this paper, the authors propose a two-level assessment method that allows assessing the completeness, coherence and operability of Civil Protection plans, and applied them to a case study. The methodology, in both versions, prove to be effective to perform a fast assessment of the status of civil protection planning at a territorial level, suitable to prioritize civil protection actions and addresses.