Nadia Netti

The escalation of climate-induced disasters underscores how climatic variability has become a main question in designing risk-sensitive policies in advanced and developing countries. The macroeconomic implications of Natural Hazards (NHs) are extremely significant as they can compromise financial stability and long-term prosperity. To mitigate risks and close the knowledge, protection and development gaps can free resources speeding up reconstruction of infrastructures, recovering from disruption of supply chains, returning to pre-disaster levels of activities. This is not a simple task involving different steps of a “ladder approach” sharing the burden of cost and responsibilities across the relevant stakeholders and reducing moral hazard. This approach rests on Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP) and technological R&D public investments able to crowd private ones in and establish useful Public-Private-Insurance-Schemes enhancing the disaster risk managing role of the State. The paper proposes leveraging innovation technology both to enhance risk assessment and reduce uncertainty for climate-related NHs such as landslides. It is an important interdisciplinary question, in fact, despite the unequivocal acknowledgment of the warming global climate system, the precise ramifications of global warming and associated climatic shifts on NHs like landslides remain still elusive. The advanced modelling technique implemented by our interdisciplinary PPP contributes to geographically circumscribe the areas eventually subjected to landslides and constantly monitor the vulnerability of their structures, infrastructures, economic activities and hence population. The reliable data that we can produce through remote sensing acquisition systems are necessary inputs to contain risk exposure both physically and financially.

The escalation of climate-induced disasters underscores how climatic variability has become a main question in designing risk-sensitive policies in advanced and developing countries. The macroeconomic implications of Natural Hazards (NHs) are extremely significant, as they can compromise financial stability and long-term prosperity. To mitigate risks and close the knowledge, protection, and development gaps can free resources, speeding up reconstruction of infrastructure, recovering from disruption of supply chains, and returning to pre-disaster levels of activities. This is not a simple task involving different steps of a “ladder approach”, sharing the burden of cost and responsibilities across the relevant stakeholders and reducing moral hazard. This approach rests on Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) and technological R&D public investments able to crowd private ones in and establish useful Public–Private Insurance Schemes enhancing the disaster risk management role of the state. This paper proposes leveraging innovation technology both to enhance risk assessment and reduce uncertainty for climate-related NHs such as landslides. It is an important interdisciplinary question; in fact, despite the unequivocal acknowledgment of the global warming system, the precise ramifications of global warming and associated climatic shifts on NHs like landslides remain still elusive. The advanced modeling technique implemented by our interdisciplinary PPP contributes to geographically circumscribe the areas eventually subjected to landslides and constantly monitor the vulnerability of their structures, infrastructures, economic activities, and hence population. The reliable data that we can produce through remote sensing acquisition systems are necessary inputs to contain risk exposure both physically and financially.

As a result of decades of austerity, the economies of the Eurozone are experiencing under-investment and crumbling infrastructures in an era of extremely severe emergencies as the cli-mate change and aggressive global competition. The private savings glut of the rich and the strict fiscal rules suggest a crowding-in approach in partnership with big finance in a new age of in-fra-structures. If governments mint public infrastructures into investable assets, they can gen-erate steady returns for investors and asset managers who look after pensions and insurances schemes and unlock trillions now devoted to welfare state. For the big finance to accept to be partner, however, governments must take the task of de-risking returns. Innovation technology and macro-financial literacy can synergically act to enhance this new de-risking role to address in a financially sustainable way the intense phenomena of Natural Hazards (NHs) that can severely compromise economic growth. This is precisely the aim of our Public-Private Partnership (PPP) among the Department of Economics, Management and Institutions of the University of Naples and a Knowledge Transfert Management, the Department of Engineering and the Aca-demic Spin-Off “STRAIN”, of the University of Campania. Our PPP has been contributing to the eval-uation and mitigation of NHs such as floods, landslides and earthquakes since 2012. The ex-tremely advanced results of this multi-stakeholder partnership ensure a better knowledge of NHs which, as evidenced in the paper, is the fundamental input for the desired Public-Private In-surance Programmes (PIPPs).

Air-fall pyroclastic deposits on steep slopes in Campania (Southern Italy) are periodically subjected to rainfall-induced landslides that may evolve into catastrophic flowslides. To protect built-up areas, early warning systems (EWSs) have been implemented which are essentially based on pluviometric thresholds or models unable to accurately monitor the physical phenomena responsible for flowslide generation in pyroclastic deposits. Over the last 20 years, landslides with no evolution in flows occurred in this area and the alarms generated by existing EWSs in the cases of rainfall were both false and highly costly, thus eroding public trust in EWSs. To improve existing EWSs, two complex models for pyroclastic soils (Cervinara and Sarno) are proposed in this paper. These two models allow correct simulation of the physical processes, such as saturation increase due to rainwater infiltration and mechanical degradation as far as undrained instability, which govern postfailure evolution. The paper concludes with the presentation of a framework proposal to be used in defining a soil database, as well as a framework for flowslide generation forecast to be used for implementation within EWSs.

This paper proposes a Multidisciplinary Decision Support System (MDSS) as an approach to manage rainfall-induced shallow landslides of the flow type (flowslides) in pyroclastic deposits. We stress the need to combine information from the fields of meteorology, geology, hydrology, geotechnics and economics to support the agencies engaged in land monitoring and management. The MDSS consists of a "simulation chain" to link rainfall to effects in terms of infiltration, slope stability and vulnerability. This "simulation chain" was developed at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) (meteorological aspects), at the Geotechnical Laboratory of the Second University of Naples (hydrological and geotechnical aspects) and at the Department of Economics of the University of Naples "Federico II" (economic aspects). The results obtained from the application of this simulation chain in the Cervinara area during eleven years of research allowed in-depth analysis of the mechanisms underlying a flowslide in pyroclastic soil.