ByMuR model: interaction among risks and uncertainty treatment in long-term multi-hazard/risk assessments

Multi-risk approaches have been recently proposed to assess and compare different risks in the same target area. The key point of multi-risk assessments are the development of homogeneous risk definitions and the treatment of risk interaction. The lack of treatment of interaction may lead to significant biases and thus to erroneous risk hierarchization, which is one of primary output of risk assessments for decision makers. Within the framework of the Italian project "ByMuR - Bayesian Multi-Risk assessment", a formal model (ByMuR model) to assess multi-risk for a target area is under development, aiming (i) to perform multi-risk analyses treating interaction between different hazardous phenomena, accounting for possible effects of interaction at hazard, vulnerability and exposure levels, and (ii) to explicitly account for all uncertainties (aleatory and epistemic) through a Bayesian approach, allowing a meaningful comparison among different risks. The model is meant to be general, but it is targeted to the assessment of volcanic, seismic and tsunami risks for the city of Naples (Italy). Here, it is presented the preliminary development of the ByMuR model. The applicability of the methodology is demonstrated through illustrative examples, in which the effects of uncertainties and the bias in single-risk estimation induced by the assumption of independence among risks are explicitly assessed. An extensive application of this methodology at regional and sub-regional scale would allow to identify where a given interaction has significant effects in long-term risk assessments, and thus when multi-risk analyses should be considered in order to provide unbiased risk estimations.