Risk analysis supporting land use planning at regional scale. The case of Mugello area

The Workpackage 6 “Case Study and quality control” of the Armonia Project has been aimed at testing, on a selected area, the methodological framework set up in WP5 for hazard, exposure and vulnerability assessment to support and drive land use planning at different scales. This represented a relevant step within the overall project, providing a validation of the research path, built up during two years facing many questions, trying to “harmonise” different expertises but, mainly, different points of view about hazard and risk analyses and their “role” within the land use planning and management processes. The methodological framework has been first of all applied at regional scale. The case-study area is composed by 21 municipalities belonging to Florence, Arezzo and Prato Provinces in Tuscany Region. The area has been singled out basing on several criteria, mainly referred to the geo-morphological features, to the existing hazard conditions and, even, to the required data availability. With respect to this area, the base-knowledge related to the current conditions in terms of hazard, exposure and vulnerability have been set up. In detail, hazard maps available for the area have been collected, exposed elements have been identified and vulnerability has been measured, according to the parameters and procedures set up in WP5. All the data have been collected and processed through a GIS. The test allowed us to validate the parameters suggested in WP5, providing some feedbacks for their improvement. The relevance of the validation is mainly due to the fact that just few of the parameters and procedures for vulnerability assessment were already available in literature and largely tested in past experiences, such as the case of buildings vulnerability to seismic risk (Meroni et. al., 2000). Most of them have been drawn from pioneering work (Granger et. al, 1999) or even proposed for the first time in the ARMONIA project. Besides, it should be underlined that the work grounds on a comprehensive approach to the concept of vulnerability (Wisner, 2001; Villagràn de Leon, 2006), including, even though basing on simplified parameters and procedures, building vulnerability, people vulnerability and, even, the features of a territorial system enabling it to cope with the event, mainly during the emergency face (coping capacity). Taking into account different aspects of vulnerability, the proposed procedure allowed us to provide disaggregated information useful for land use planning and management, but it increased the difficulty to find out a synthetic risk assessment in terms of expected damages. Thus the test, according to the main target of the Armonia project, has been mainly addressed to provide planners with synthetic tables where all risk factors (hazards, exposure, building and people vulnerability, coping capacity and enchained events) are shown, contributing to define the compatibility of the different planning choices. To this aim, some tables, related to different land uses (agricultural area, urban fabric) have been set up, showing the present conditions of hazard, vulnerability and coping capacity, evaluating if the Provincial Coordination Plan of Florence forecasts increase or decrease these conditions, defining the compatibility level of the planning choices with all the different risk factors, providing planners with appropriate guidelines. Furthermore, a detailed table for coping capacity has been set up. This table is referred to each municipality and not to land uses, as coping capacity analyses have been carried out referring to the whole municipality. Thus, for each municipality the table provides planners with detailed information related to coping capacity, in order to verify if planning choices improve or decrease it, and with some guidelines for improving current situation. In conclusion, the work carried out within WP6 seems to validate the proposed methodological framework showing, mainly, its relevance to support land use planning through guidelines both to reduce future risks in new settlements and to mitigate current risk conditions in existing ones. Furthermore, the test has shown that the proposed parameters and procedures can be easily applied and managed by the multi-risk decision support system (DSS) as designed in WP5.