Tsunami risk perception in Italy
Abstract
Within the activities of the Tsunami Alert Centre (CAT) of INGV, in 2018 we started a research for assessing tsunami risk perception and understanding in two regions of southern Italy exposed to high hazard (Apulia and Calabria, facing on Adriatic, Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas). The main goal of this study is to verify how tsunami risk perception compares with the hazard assessed by scientific data, and which are the main factors controlling people's knowledge and awareness. We first analysed a sample of 1021 interviewees representing about 3.2 million people living in the coastal municipalities of the two regions.
Results show that people appear to be relatively well informed on tsunamis, but risk perception appears to be low: for almost half of the sample the occurrence of a tsunami in the Mediterranean Sea is considered quite unlikely. The survey results show that people's perception and understanding of tsunamis are affected by media accounts of the Sumatra 2004 and Japan 2011 mega-tsunamis. At the same time, the risk posed by small tsunamis (< 0.5 m inundation height) is basically underrated or neglected, posing some critical questions for risk mitigation strategies, particularly in touristic areas. Furthermore, the survey's results show that for lay people the word 'tsunami' has a different meaning with respect to the Italian traditional word 'maremoto", implying that the same physical phenomenon would be understood in two different ways by younger, educated people and elders with low education level. People have high expectations from authorities, CPAs, research institutions. Moreover, living in different coastal areas appears to have a significant influence on the way tsunami hazard is perceived: Interviewees of Tyrrhenian Calabria are more likely to associate tsunami risk to volcanoes with respect to those living in the Ionian coastal areas. In addition, TV emerges as the most relevant source of knowledge for 90% of the sample. Some categories (e.g. elder women) would like to get early warnings from broadcast media and sirens rather than receiving them by SMS or apps, suggesting the need for redundancy and modulation of EW messages. An update of the survey is ongoing, broadening the sampled areas to adjacent regions. These results could have important implications for both risk communication and mitigation policies.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMNH43E0991A
- Keywords:
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- 4315 Monitoring;
- forecasting;
- prediction;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4341 Early warning systems;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4564 Tsunamis and storm surges;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL