Flood In Italy Research Articles

A Public–Private Insurance Model for Disaster Risk Management: An Application to Italy

This paper proposes a public–private insurance model for earthquakes and floods in Italy in which the insurer and the government co-operate in risk financing. Our model departs from the existing literature by describing an insurance scheme intended to relieve the financial burden that natural events place on governments, while at the same time assisting individuals and protecting the insurance business. Hence, the business aims at maximizing social welfare rather than profits. Given the limited amount of data available on natural risks, expected losses per individual are estimated through risk-modeling. In order to evaluate the insurer’s loss profile, spatial correlation among insured assets is included. Our findings suggest that, when not supported by the government, private insurance might either financially over-expose the insurer or set premiums so high that individuals would fail to purchase policies. This evidence is stronger for earthquake risks, but it is considerable for floods too. We found that jointly managing the two perils alleviates the burden on public capitals by lowering the amount of capitals required and by keeping the probability of additional capital injections into the insurance reserves relatively low.

Fiscal Policy Response of Local Governments to Floods in Italy

Fiscal Policy Response of Local Governments to Floods in Italy

Fiscal policy response of local governments to floods in Italy

Fiscal policy response of local governments to floods in Italy

The usability of the IdroGEO web platform for the dissemination of information on landslides and floods in Italy

The usability of the IdroGEO web platform for the dissemination of information on landslides and floods in Italy

IdroGEO: A Collaborative Web Mapping Application Based on REST API Services and Open Data on Landslides and Floods in Italy

The new national IdroGEO web platform allows the navigation, social sharing and download of data, maps, reports of the Italian Landslide Inventory, national hazard maps, and risk indicators. It is a tool for communication and dissemination of information to support decisions in risk mitigation policies, land use planning, preliminary design of infrastructures, prioritization of mitigation measures, management of civil protection emergencies, and environmental impact assessment. The challenges that have been faced during the design and development of the platform concern usability, access on multiple devices (smartphones, tablets, desktops), interoperability, transparency, reuse of information and software in the public sector, and improvement of the updating of the Italian Landslide Inventory. The methodologies and solutions adopted to address them include Progressive Web Application (PWA), Application Programming Interface (API), open standards, open libraries, and software. A landslide inventory management system has been developed via REST API for data entry and approval workflow in order to maintain the inventory in a distributed and collaborative manner. As a result, IdroGEO provides a public service for citizens, public administration, and professionals, using the “mobile first” approach and with scalable and reliable architecture. IdroGEO represents a solid infrastructure for the interoperability of data that serves as the foundation for creating a first knowledge-graph on landslides and the community who manages them.

Remote Sensing-Based Methodology for the Quick Update of the Assessment of the Population Exposed to Natural Hazards

The assessment of the number of people exposed to natural hazards, especially in countries with strong urban growth, is difficult to be updated at the same rate as land use develops. This paper presents a remote sensing-based procedure for quickly updating the assessment of the population exposed to natural hazards. A relationship between satellite nightlights intensity and urbanization density from global available cartography is first assessed when all data are available. This is used to extrapolate urbanization data at different time steps, updating exposure each time new nightlights intensity maps are available. To test the reliability of the proposed methodology, the number of people exposed to riverine flood in Italy is assessed, deriving a probabilistic relationship between DMSP nightlights intensity and urbanization density from the GUF database for the year 2011. People exposed to riverine flood are assessed crossing the population distributed on the derived urbanization density with flood hazard zones provided by ISPRA. The validation against reliable exposures derived from ISTAT data shows good agreement. The possibility to update exposure maps with a higher refresh rate makes this approach particularly suitable for applications in developing countries, where urbanization and population densities may change at a sub-yearly time scale.

Empirical flash flood vulnerability functions for residential buildings

The estimation of flood losses is crucial for the quantitative estimation of risk and the cost–benefit analysis of risk mitigation and prevention measures. Flood losses are usually estimated by means of vulnerability functions, which are often developed in a synthetic way by experts, since loss datasets collected after events are sparse or lacking and mostly refer to slow riverine inundations. Simple univariable empirical vulnerability functions are recognized as a more valuable tool with respect to synthetic curves developed for different contexts. The aim of this work is to derive empirical vulnerability functions for a flash flood event which occurred in Livorno (Italy) in September 2017, based on the hydrologic–hydraulic reconstruction of the flood and observed losses to residential properties. The hydrologic processes are reproduced with a distributed hydrologic model, and the flood propagation is simulated with a full 2D model. Many open GIS data are used and combined with virtual on-site inspection in the study area to analyze building exposure. Different regression curves are tested to fit the data and obtain damage curves. The results show (i) a poor correlation between relative or absolute losses and flow velocity, (ii) a low correlation between relative losses and water depth, thus confirming the existing literature. More significant correlation is found between absolute losses and water depths. The curves here derived provide a first attempt to develop damage functions for flash flood in Italy, which could be applied in similar urban and morphologic contexts.

The transition to adaptive storm-water management: Learning from existing experiences in Italy and Southern France

Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) are solutions which use natural processes to manage storm-water. Having detected the inability of conventional storm-water management to cope alone with e.g. urban flooding, the incorporation of SuDS in action plans can enable a shift towards a more sustainable handling of storm-water. The principles underlying adaptive storm-water management can potentially be realised through the implementation of SuDS. However, the SuDS concept remains undeveloped and poorly researched in Mediterranean countries. This paper explores the extent to which SuDS have been used to manage floods in Italy and Southern France. Examples of SuDS are identified through a review of grey literature and then analysed by a set of socio-technical criteria that evaluate the adoption of the principles of adaptive storm-water management. Findings show an ongoing transition towards an adaptive approach, although mature adaptive storm-water management has been neither supported in policy nor realised in practice. SuDS are fostered in both countries but while a recent increase in their adoption can be observed in Southern France, their implementation is more limited in Italy. However, a conservative and technically focused policy and implementation process has been promoted. Governance practices have, for instance, undergone almost no change.

Landslides in coastal areas of Italy

Abstract Of the more than 8000 km of coasts in Italy, about 35% consist of cliffs and rocky shores. On them many villages are located, some of them dating back to Roman or Greek times. Typical natural hazards along these coastal areas are rock falls, slides and debris flows. They induce locally extremely high levels of risk, as shown by the many disasters that have occurred in recent time. This paper provides a first portrait over the whole of Italy of (1) the number and distribution of coastal landslides; (2) their typologies; (3) their state of activity; (4) the most common damage and exposed elements; and (5) the most typical mitigation measures. This information has been largely derived from the IFFI archive (Italian Landslides Inventory). Geographic information system processing has allowed us to identify 4135 landslides affecting a large portion of the Italian cliffed coasts. The damage evaluation, based on the AVI archive (inventory of information on sites historically affected by landslides and floods in Italy for the period 1918–2000), has shown the extent of the problem: there have been 408 casualties in the 20th century and 713 significant disruptions of the rail and road networks. A more detailed analysis has been carried out in three sample areas to illustrate the basic factors controlling the genesis and evolution of slope instabilities in the various coastal settings.

The 1966 “century” flood in Italy: A meteorological and hydrological revisitation

The widespread flood event that affected northeastern and central Italy in November 1966, causing severe damages to vast populated areas including the historical towns of Florence and Venice, is revisited with a modeling approach, made possible by the availability of the ECMWF global reanalysis (ERA‐40). A simulated forecasting chain consisting of the ECMWF global model, forcing a cascade of two mesoscale, limited area meteorological models apt to reach a convective resolving scale (about 2 km), is used to predict quantitative precipitation. A hydrological model, nested in the finer‐scale meteorological model, is used to reproduce forecasted flood hydrographs for different river basins of the investigated areas. Predicted precipitation is in general very sensitive to initial conditions, especially when associated with convective activity, such as over central Italy, in the Arno river basin. Orographically enhanced precipitation, e.g., the one predicted in the eastern Alps, is quite stable and in good agreement with observations. Hydrological forecasts, made separately in different river basins, reflect the accuracy of the simulated precipitation.

Information system on hydrological and geomorphological catastrophes in Italy (SICI): a tool for managing landslide and flood hazards

Abstract. Since 1990, we have maintained a database of historical information on landslides and floods in Italy, known as the National Research Council's AVI (Damaged Urban Areas) archive. The database was originally designed to respond to a request of the Minister of Civil Protection, and was aimed at helping the regional assessment of landslide and flood risk in Italy. The database was compiled in 1991-1992 to cover the period 1917 to 1990, and then updated to cover systematically the period 1917 to 2000, and non-systematically the periods 1900 to 1916 and 2001 to 2002. The database currently contains information on more than 32000 landslide events occurred at more than 21000 sites, and on more than 29000 flood events occurred at more than 14000 sites. Independently from the AVI archive, we have obtained other databases containing information on damage caused by mass movements and inundations, daily discharge measurements and solid-transport measurements at selected gauging stations, bibliographical and reference information on landslides and inundations, and a catalogue of National legislation on hydrological and geological hazards and risk in Italy. The databases are part of an information system known as SICI (an Italian acronym for Sistema Informativo sulle Catastrofi Idrogeologiche, Information System on Hydrological and Geomorphological Catastrophes), which is currently the largest single repository of historical information on landslides and floods in Italy. After an outline of the history and evolution of the AVI Project archive, we present and discuss: (a) the structure of the SICI information system, including the hardware and software solutions adopted to maintain, manage, update, use and disseminate the information stored in the various databases, (b) the type and amount of information stored in each database, including an estimate of their completeness, and (c) examples of recent applications of the information system, including a web-based GIS system to show the location of sites historically affected by landslides and floods, and an estimate of geo-hydrological (i.e. landslide and flood) risk in Italy based on the available historical information.

The AVI project: A bibliographical and archive inventory of landslides and floods in Italy

The AVI project was commissioned by the Minister of Civil Protection to the National Group for Prevention of Hydrogeologic Hazards to complete an inventory of areas historically affected by landslides and floods in Italy. More than 300 people, divided into 15 research teams and two support groups, worked for one year on the project. Twenty-two journals were systematically searched for the period 1918–1990, 350,000 newspaper issues were screened, and 39,953 articles were collected. About 150 experts on mass movement and floods were interviewed and 1482 published and unpublished technical and scientific reports were reviewed. The results of the AVI project, in spite of the limitations, represent the most comprehensive archiving of mass movement and floods ever prepared in Italy. The type and quality of the information collected and the methodologies and techniques used to make the inventory are discussed. Possible applications and future developments are also presented.