Territorial Digital Twins: A key for increasing the community resilience of fragile mountain inner territories?

Abstract

Areas suffering territorial imbalances are at risk, as climate change and inherent social-spatial vulnerabilities bring uncertainty over their capacity to achieve sustainable development. To enable policy-makers' vision for them, the paper proposes adopting digitally-enhanced disaster risk reduction practices which promote civic engagement and evidence-based decision-making. The study introduces the concept of Territorial Digital Twins (TDTs) demonstrating the potential benefits of networking distributed information resources and enabling their integration in two paradigmatic Italian inner mountain areas, which are linked to different priorities of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (SFDRR). This contribution argues the importance of complementing the technical approach with the social perspective in the development of TDTs oriented at increasing the community resilience of territorially imbalanced areas. It then illustrates the usefulness of exploiting TDTs (from photogrammetry, GIS mapping, Space Syntax analysis) to overcome the barriers to the SFDRR, and enable its effective implementation in localities.