Geomorphosites and Natural Hazards: Teaching the Importance of Geomorphology in Society

Abstract

Geomorphosites and geological landscapes are among the most important tourist attractions of rural and mountain areas. In the past decades, especially thanks to several research and cultural projects on geological heritage, many regional and local authorities have started inventorying and publicising their landscapes and sites of geological and geomorphological interest publishing booklets, geotouristic maps and equipping their territories with explanatory panels. Nevertheless, geology and geomorphology are able to occupy the head titles of the major newspapers or make the breaking news on TV channels only when natural hazards hit the population. Making the processes that shape the morphologies at the Earth’s surface understandable to a wider public and helping people to “read” the wide variety of signs and remnants of recent or remote natural disasters might help to retain society’s memory of these phenomena and therefore minimise human and material losses. The geomorphological scars in the landscape that remind, if adequately interpreted, past natural and or human-induced disasters are ideal spots for geo-environmental education and should therefore be the subject of a scientific programme able to exploit their didactic value. This paper reports some interesting examples of such sites in Italy.