GIS and geomatics for disaster management and emergency relief: a proactive response to natural hazards

Geo-information and remote sensing are proper tools to enhance functional strategies for increasing awareness on natural hazard prevention and for supporting research and operational activities devoted to disaster reduction. An improved Earth Sciences knowledge coupled with Geomatics advanced technologies is here proposed with the goal of reducing human, social, economic and environmental losses due to natural hazards and related disasters. Research activities lead to the collection and evaluation of data from: global and national literature for the definition of predisposing/triggering factors and evolutionary processes of natural instability phenomena (landslides, floods, storms, …) and for the analysis of statistical methods for the prediction of natural disasters; local and regional historical, geological, geomorphological studies of mountain territories of Europe and Developing Countries. Geodatabases, Remote Sensing and Mobile-GIS applications were developed to perform analysis of: 1) large, climate-related disaster (Hurricane Mitch, Central America; Zambesi Flood, Mozambique), either for early warning or mitigation measures at the national and international scale; 2) distribution on slope instabilities at the regional scale (Landslide Inventory in the Aosta Valley, NW-Italy), to activate prevention and recovering measures; 3) geological and geomorphological controlling factors of seismicity, to provide microzonation maps and scenarios for co-seismic response of instable zones (Dronero, NW- Italian Alps);4) earthquake effects on ground and infrastructures, in order to register early assessment for awareness situations and for compile damage inventories (2000, 2001 and 2003 Asti-Alessandria seismic events). The research results has been able to substantiate early impact models by structuring geodatabases on natural disasters, and to support humanitarian relief and disaster management activities by creating and testing SRG2, a mobile-GIS application for field-data collection on natural hazards and risks.