Scientific and Non-scientific challenges for operational earthquake forecasting

Seismic hazard is characterized by significant variations on a time scale from days to few years. Forecasting the evolution of these variations has the potential to expand the capability to manage the seismic risk beyond the definition of a traditional seismic building code. This is the goal of the so-called operational earthquake forecasting (OEF), which comprises procedures for gathering and disseminating authoritative information about the time dependence of seismic hazards to help communities prepare for potentially destructive earthquakes. Here we describe the current OEF status, with a specific emphasis on Italy, and we discuss some of the biggest scientific and nonscientific challenges encountered so far. They can be summarized in a few basic concepts: i) scientific misconceptions of what a probabilistic forecast means; ii) violation of the hazard/risk separation principle; iii) common thought that laymen cannot understand probabilities; iv) objective lacking of good-practices in communicating low-probability high-impact events.