Assessing and Improving Flood and Landslide Community Social Awareness and Engagement via a Web Platform: The Case of Italy

Italy is significantly affected by ever-present flood and landslide risks and has experienced many disasters. Local social awareness and engagement, however, differ and need to be increased by decision makers and citizens through improvements in risk preparedness. With this aim, the #italiasicura web platform was developed by Fondazione Politecnico di Milano and released in 2015 to show country to local level hazard maps and risk reduction projects in Italy. Any stage of the user experience with the platform can be shared via social media. Using this tool, an awareness-oriented web analytics process was structured to develop a set of indicators for the increase of knowledge linked to flood and landslide hazards. In so doing, it is possible to measure community disaster awareness actions and competence in the area of hazard knowledge. This article presents the results obtained by using data from the platform.