Tracking a Decade of Hydrogeological Emergencies in Italian Municipalities

Abstract

This dataset collects tabular and geographical information about all hydrogeological disasters (landslides and floods) that occurred in Italy from 2013 to 2022 that caused such severe impacts as to require the declaration of national-level emergencies. The severity and spatiotemporal extension of each emergency are characterized in terms of duration and timing, funds requested by local administrations, funds approved by the national government, and municipalities and provinces hit by the event (further subdivided between those included in the emergency and those not, depending on whether relevant impacts were ascertained). Italian exposure to hydrogeological risk is portrayed strikingly: in the covered period, 123 emergencies affected Italy, all regions were struck at least once, and some provinces were struck more than 10 times. Damage declared by local institutions adds up to EUR 11,000,000,000, while national recovery funds add up to EUR 1,000,000,000. The dataset may foster further research on risk assessment, econometric analysis, public policy support, and decision-making implementation. Moreover, it provides systematic evidence helpful in raising awareness about hydrogeological risks affecting Italy.

Optimization of rainfall thresholds for landslide early warning through false alarm reduction and a multi-source validation

“…The second dataset is the national-level civil protection emergencies collected by Gatto et al (2023). For Italian legislation, national-level emergencies are extremely critical events that require extraordinary measures and nationwide coordination due to high magnitude, severity of impacts, and spatial extension.…”

“…The ground effects of these emergency events are manifold, including floods, landslides, and huge damages to infrastructures, private properties, and population. These types of events could impact small or large territories in a limited time period or could last up to months, and according to Gatto et al (2023), sometimes it is not possible to narrow down the start and end dates of these events, resulting in scarce temporal detail. Moreover, commonly not every AZ is hit during an event, meaning that some areas could not be damaged or included in a national-level emergency state.…”

“…A standard validation process was performed using a subsample of the landslide dataset (2010 to 2019 data used for calibration, 2020-2021 data used for validation). Afterward, the model results were compared with alternative source of information, including (i) the alerts issued by the warning system currently in use in the Liguria region, for the period 2015-2021, and (ii) a dataset of national-level emergencies (Gatto et al 2023), for the period 2013-2021. While the first allowed evaluating if the model outputs are consistent with the alert levels that the civil protection system would have issued, the second allowed to focus the validation of the model with respect to high-severity landslide events.…”

SLEM (Shallow Landslide Express Model): A Simplified Geo-Hydrological Model for Powerlines Geo-Hazard Assessment

“…Recently, databases and censuses have been provided for planning purposes to help municipalities and governments, taking into consideration geo-hydrological hazards and relative exposed facilities and communities. Among them, the PAI maps (Piano di Assetto Idrogeologico) and the IFFI census (Inventario Fenomeni Franosi Italiano) are the reference data adopted at the Italian national scale for geo-hydrological risk evaluation and prevention [18,19]. Together with the analyses conducted at European levels, they represent the state-of-art for geo-hydrological studies [20,21].…”

Inventory of Landslides in the Northern Half of the Taihang Mountain Range, China

“…Landslides are one of the major types of geologic hazards globally, causing severe casualties and property damage every year [1][2][3][4]. How to prevent and mitigate landslide disaster risk losses has long been a focus of research.…”