Civil protection achievements and critical issues in seismology and earthquake engineering research

Abstract

A great complexity characterizes the relationships between science and civil protection. Science attains advances that can allow civil protection organizations to make decisions and undertake actions more and more effectively. Provided that these advances are consolidated and shared by a large part of the scientific community, civil protection has to take them into account in its operational procedures and in its decision-making processes, and it has to do this while growing side by side with the scientific knowledge, avoiding any late pursuit. The aim of the paper is to outline the general framework and the boundary conditions, to describe the overall model of such relationships and the current stateof- the-art, focusing on the major results achieved in Italy and on the many criticalities, with special regards to research on seismic risk. Among the boundary conditions, the question of the different roles and responsibilities in the decision-making process will be addressed, dealing in particular with the contribution of scientists and decision-makers, among the others, in the risk management. In this frame, the different kinds of contributions that civil protection receives from the scientific community will be treated. Some of them are directly planned, asked and funded by civil protection. Some contributions come instead from research that the scientific community develops in other frameworks. All of them represent an added value from which civil protection wants to take advantage, but only after a necessary endorsement by a large part of the scientific community and an indispensable adaptation to civil protection utilization. This is fundamental in order to avoid that any decision and any consequent action, which could in principle affect the life and property of many citizens, be undertaken on the basis of non-consolidated and/or minor and/or not shared scientific achievements.