A Proposal for a Geospatial Database to Support Emergency Management

The basic procedure of the Italian Civil Protection Department aims at reducing disaster losses by giving prominence to a proactive strategy, focusing on prevision and prevention of hazard events rather than postdisater activities. Italian law commits municipalities to produce Emergency Plans that include risk scenarios as well as all data required for emer- gency management, such as structures, infrastructures and human resources. However the law in the matter of Civil Protection does not supply information about how to produce and archive necessary data for emergency planning and management. For this reason, we propose a standard methodology to create a geodatabase using GIS software, to col- lect all data that could be used by municipalities to create Emergency Plans. The resulting geodatabase provides a tool for hazard mitigation planning, allowing not only the identification of areas at risk, but also the structures, infrastruc- tures and resources needed to overcome a crisis, thus improving all strategies of risk reduction and the resilience of the system