Basic principles of multi-risk assessment: a case study in Italy

The assessment of the impact of different catastrophic events in a given area requires innovative approaches that allow risks comparison and that account for all the possible risk interactions. In the common practice, the risk evaluation related to different sources is generally done through indepen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Natural hazards (Dordrecht) 2012-06, Vol.62 (2), p.551-573
Main Authors: Marzocchi, Warner, Garcia-Aristizabal, Alexander, Gasparini, Paolo, Mastellone, Maria Laura, Di Ruocco, Angela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agglomeration
Assessments
Case studies
Civil Engineering
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Engineering and environment geology. Geothermics
Environmental impact analysis
Environmental Management
Environmental policy
Exact sciences and technology
Geophysics/Geodesy
Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences
Hazards
Hydrogeology
Indexes
Italy
Mathematical analysis
Municipalities
Natural Hazards
Natural hazards: prediction, damages, etc
Natural resources
Original Paper
Origins
Risk
Risk assessment
Risk factors
Strategy
Threats
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Summary:The assessment of the impact of different catastrophic events in a given area requires innovative approaches that allow risks comparison and that account for all the possible risk interactions. In the common practice, the risk evaluation related to different sources is generally done through independent analyses, adopting disparate procedures and time--space resolutions. Such a strategy of risks evaluation has some evident major drawbacks as, for example, it is difficult (if not impossible) to compare the risk of different origins, and the implicit assumption of independence of the risk sources leads to neglect possible interactions among threats and/or cascade effects. The latter may amplify the overall risk, and potentially the multi-risk index could be higher than the simple aggregation of single-risk indexes calculated considering each source as independent from the others. In this paper, we put forward some basic principles for multi-risk assessment, and we consider a real application to Casalnuovo municipality (Southern Italy), in which we face the problem to make different hazards comparable, and we highlight when and how possible interactions among different threats may become important.
ISSN:0921-030X
1573-0840
DOI:10.1007/s11069-012-0092-x