Final Hazards Report for Italy, May 2025

 Final Hazards Report for Italy, May 2025

Italy experiences many natural hazards, from earthquakes to volcanic eruptions, flooding, landslides, tsunamis, droughts, and extreme weather events.  The main natural hazards are also dependent on the region and many are exacerbated by our changing climate.  This report will include two of the most deadly natural hazards: earthquakes and floods.  According to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (Source), and found on this website, Italy's biggest three risks are flood & landslide, followed by extreme temperature & storm, and then earthquakes.  However, 82% of the deaths associated with natural disasters from 1900-2016 were from earthquakes.  16% of deaths were from extreme temperatures & storms, and only 2% were from floods & landslides.  (See figure below.)  Economically, earthquakes and flooding & landslide events are the most costly (Source).  

Earthquakes happen because of Italy’s location between the Eurasian and African tectonic plates and its geomorphology.  This is a very seismically active area.  The cause of floods is not as clearly defined.  For example, one article links a flooding event to climate change (Source), while another says that climate change is not the cause and that it was a result of “highly unique and unusual weather conditions” (Source).  This flood (the Emilia Romagna flood in May 2023) resulted in landslides and cost more than 300m Euros and at least 17 lives (Source).


Italy has one of the highest seismic hazards in Europe, high vulnerability, and high exposure (Source).  Fortunately, there are mitigation measures in place to minimize loss of life and seismic risk, as well as improve the response of the civil protection system (Source).  My recommendation with respect to earthquakes would be to follow with these mitigation efforts.  Additional efforts should include increasing limitations or bans on fracking, or at least move away from our reliance on fossil fuels.  Even though the USGS says that injecting byproducts of oil production is the cause of the increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma and not fracking (Source), purposely creating cracks in underground rocks, extracting fluid, and injecting water and chemicals disrupts Earth’s natural rock cycle.


For flooding mitigation, I am going to make the assumption that climate change is the root cause of the rain events that lead to flooding.  There are direct and indirect mitigation measures I would suggest.  Direct efforts would include improving infrastructure, warning systems, communication systems, and encouraging people to move away from flood zones (Source).  Indirect efforts would include reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to slow down global warming and extreme weather events.  We can do that by decreasing reliance on fossil fuels which emit Carbon dioxide (CO2) (Source), and eat lower on the food chain so that we do not have a bunch of cows emitting methane (CH4) (Source).


For both earthquake mitigation, I would focus on central Italy.  The devastating earthquake in 2009 was in L’Aquila (Source) and the earthquake in 2016 was also in that area (Source). 

(Source)

For flooding mitigation, I would focus on northern Italy.  The reason for this is because the most recent flooding events were in the north (Source).


Honestly, I am not sure where I would build my home given what I have learned about Italy’s hazards.  I think I would build in Bari, as I have not seen many hazards in that region and that is where part of my family is from!

Source

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