Municipal Emergency Plans in Italy: requirements and drawbacks

Abstract

In order to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of land use planning and emergency panning policies and strategies in EU, the Italian regulations and guidelines are used as example to discuss the distance between the European and national regulation and the disaster management and post-disaster procedures, that together with the land use planning are often conceived for a Municipal scale. Both anthropic and natural risks are dealt with in the emergency planning, but risk information derive from very diverse sources, with different levels of detail - from the risk assessment of major risk plants to the representation of risks provided by sectorial plans, each one focused on a single type of risk (i.e. flood, seismic, fire…). Emergency plans should aim at correlating the various risk evaluations, thus being able to provide a comprehensive emergency programme, both for people and territorial safety, but indeed the land use is often regulated by a completely different legislation and designing system. This lack of linkage between the procedures for Emergency and for Land Use Planning makes the emergency management less effective towards the achievement of a real safety of territories, as proved by recent disastrous events in the European territory. In order to solve these critical issues, the paper aims at providing hints on how to achieve a different approach both in land use and emergency planning, conceiving risk assessment as part of an integrated process composed by many important and interrelated phases, not only postdisaster emergency, but also structural interventions for the long- term prevention