Assessing Geo-hazard Vulnerability of Cities and Critical Infrastructures: Working in the e-Shape Framework

To improve safety in large cities, products and services exploiting Earth Observation (EO) technologies can be used to map vulnerable urban areas potentially affected by geohazards, with the aim of reducing human and economic losses caused by natural disasters. This work aims to increase the use of multi-mission EO derived products and services to assess urban vulnerability and geohazards, raising early awareness and training key users and decision makers on the use of EO derived products and services.

Currently, the InSAR processing tools from Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP) funded by European Space Agency, provide massive and dense surface displacement information, and availability of such data is expected to be expanded soon with the upcoming European Ground Motion Service being developed by the European Environment Agency. As the main end users are not trained to understand and analyze this type of data, the EU founded e-Shape project, in collaboration with the national Geological Surveys, is introducing a methodology for the use of InSAR products and supporting them to co-design specific products useful for the dissemination of information to the users active in key societal sectors  (local and regional administrations, and civil protection authorities). To this end, four products with different requirements have been developed, including the InSAR map, the InSAR validation report, the active geohazards report and the vulnerable urban areas report. These four products describe the displacements of the area, their accuracy, their relationship to triggers and the potential problems they could create, providing information for both technical staff and non-technical managers and decision-makers.