Disaster Risk Management: Building the 'Disaster Risk Assessment Tool' for Italy

The paper provides a comprehensive assessment of hazard, exposure, vulnerability and resilience related to natural disasters in Italian municipalities. Indicators of the various components of risk assessment are built according to state-of-the-art methods. The combination of these dimensions is especially useful to identify hot spots that are characterized by high hazard, exposure and vulnerability and by low resilience. We also discuss the extent to which the institutional framework in place in Italy is able to deal with natural disasters. The Disaster Risk Assessment tool (DRAT) developed by our paper may help policy makers in prioritising areas for intervention and it is particularly valuable when effective choices about mitigation and prevention strategies are to be taken in presence of tight public budgets.