Terraferma: an interactive tool for insurance seismic risk awareness in Italy

Abstract

<p>Despite its high susceptibility to earthquakes, Italy's protection gap for seismic risk is one of the largest in the world: only a small percentage of economic losses caused by earthquakes come under an insurance policy. One of the reasons is a lack of public awareness of seismic risk. </p> <p>Terraferma attempts to respond to this problem.</p> <p>Terraferma is an interactive tool developed by Leithà, the competence center of the Unipol Group for Data Science and Computer Science, and adopted by different insurance companies of the Unipol Group.</p> <p>The main objective of this tool is to raise customers' awareness about the frequency and intensity of earthquake events in Italy, especially while underwriting a home insurance policy or getting a mortgage loan.</p> <p>Starting from the user's geolocation, Terraferma shows an interactive map of the earthquakes recorded by the seismic network of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), together with information such as the magnitude, intensity, and depth of the quakes and the estimated area of propagation.</p> <p>From a technological point of view, Terraferma is an application developed in the cloud using the serverless computing paradigm.</p> <p>Terraferma is accessible openly at www.incontra-terraferma.it.</p>