Mapping multi-risk for cultural heritage at the national scale

Preserving cultural heritage from natural hazards is of paramount importance due to the role that cultural heritage plays in supporting community resilience and economic activities. Therefore, being able to map the risk faced by cultural heritage, especially in a multi-risk perspective, is useful to provide a policy-making tool which highlights hotspot areas.

In this work, we present a preliminary version of a multi-risk map of cultural heritage at the national scale considering flood, earthquake, landslide and wildfire hazards, in Italy. The exposure dataset provided by the Italian Ministry of Culture counts ca. 180-thousand-point elements grouped into three classes (Architecture, Archaeological, green open space) and 393 typologies (e.g., archive, arch, abbey etc.). In order to categorize the elements in a more convenient fashion, a taxonomy of 30 classes is defined by intersecting common geometric properties of the elements (e.g., tall, subterranean, equidimensional etc.) with the type of structure (e.g., defensive architecture, buildings potentially containing valuable items, etc.). For each hazard, a qualitative classification of the vulnerability of each taxonomic element has been assigned based on expert judgement and literature studies. As source of hazard information, the national landslide inventory (provided by Istituto Superiore Per La Protezione E La Ricerca Ambientale), the flood risk management plans (by Hydrographic District Authorities), the peak ground acceleration map (by Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia) and the wildfire hazard map (CIMA Research Foundation) have been adopted. Single risk hotspots and a multi-risk map have been produced by preliminary selecting the municipal boundaries as scale of aggregation of the results.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work attempting to merge national-scale datasets to produce a multi-risk map for cultural heritage. Our ambition for the future is to extend this method to other types of risk and countries.

 

Acknowledgments: This study was carried out within the RETURN Extended Partnership and received funding from the European Union Next-GenerationEU (National Recovery and Resilience Plan – NRRP, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.3 – D.D. 1243 2/8/2022, PE0000005).