A large-scale prioritisation to strengthen the resilience of communities in Italian territorial contexts

In the aftermath of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, the Italian government issued significant measures to stimulate seismic prevention in its territories. To this end, billions of euros were distributed to the twenty Italian Regions in proportion to their seismic risk and according to the requests of public administrators and private taxpayers. However, the distribution of resources among the Regions took place without considering important aspects of resilience such as the emergency management and recovery, as well as the integration and social cohesion of populations. This article proposes a framework to identify a large-scale prioritisation of the Italian Territorial Contexts (TCs) recently defined for civil protection purposes in order to allocate economic resources among Regions in accordance with the resilience deficiencies of their communities. The proposal is based on known methods of multi-criteria analysis that are commonly used in the engineering field, and as a first application, it has been applied to all TCs of five Regions of southern Italy. The results of this study may be useful for policy makers to develop a national resilience policy.