The use of GIS as tool to support risk assessment

Abstract

Risk assessment is a complex issue aiming at evaluation of different aspects of disaster damages. Traditionally, risk analysis relies on mathematical models to establish the likelihood of a given event occurring with a given degree of intensity in a given site. The major limitation of this type of approach is the fact that the field of risk necessarily entails uncertainty and it is not therefore always possible to make realistic hypotheses about possible future scenarios. Therefore, a new approach is required, that can take into account social, economic, cultural, and political aspects that are not generally considered in traditional assessment methods, but that serve to define the capacity of response of a territorial system to a disaster. In this paper we present a new approach, according to which the assessment process breaks down the principal goals into a hierarchy of lower level sub-goals. Each element of the hierarchy is assigned a local weight that evaluates the importance of that element not in overall terms (i.e. referred to the principal goal), but only in relation to the supra-ordinate element with which it is compared. The approach is tested in a case study estimating the risk of flooding in the Municipality of Monopoli, Italy. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.