GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

Challenging risk reduction through education and preparedness G.L. Piangiamore 1 , G. Musacchio 2 , M. Bocchia 3 1 INGV - Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sede di Portovenere, Italy 2 INGV - Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sede di Roma, Italy 3 Provincia della Spezia, Settore Difesa del Suolo, Servizio di Protezione Civile, La Spezia, Italy Introduction. It is increasingly acknowledged that disasters are the result of natural and social processes (Okazaki, 2007). Unlike the natural conditions that have a strong unpredictability component, social dimension of the disaster risk relates to the way human being interacts with natures. Hence, human behavior is the crucial factor in the degree of vulnerability and the likelihood of disasters taking place. Often people seem to know that a natural disaster might hit them, nonetheless the lack of awareness results in a general underestimation for effectiveness of actions towards risk mitigation. In many countries only few households or public buildings have disaster plans and supply kits, or have retrofitted and safe-proofed the inside, in case of earthquakes. Similarly little actions have been taken to safe-proof land in case of hydrogeologic threat. Disaster preparedness and prevention programs often remain in the domain of assumptions instead of evidence (Horton, 2011). Since disasters are infrequent in nature and memories are short (Komac, 2009; Biernacki et al. , 2008; Wisner, 2006; Komac et al. , 2011), there is an urge to promote culture of prevention and preparedness. The misconception about disasters as nature’s curse has most to do with mindset of people towards safety culture and the chance to live hazard in a sustainable way. The future emergency response needs to be better aligned with a longer term perspective in terms of development, crucial socioeconomic investments and infrastructure and, above all, preparedness (Horton, 2011). Here, education plays a significant role. The key to reduce risk is to start from scratch. We need to enhance capacity building for disaster risk reduction and, to do so, we need to educate both decision makers and general public. The Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015 Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters, adopted at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, highlights knowledge and education as one of the five main priorities of action. In this paper we deal with actions based on education to challenge perception and memory of disasters while builing knowledge and skills essential for disaster preparedness. Having children has a chief target one can rely on a chain reaction (domino effect): children transmit the risk-related knowledge to their parents and other people in their social network (e.g.: Cardona, 2007; Stoltman et al. , 2007; Wisner, 2006; Kuhlicke et al. , 2011). Education to raise risk perception and awareness. Every individual’s cultural heritage should include disaster awareness and the development of such attitudes should be encouraged in early childhood. As disaster risk management should be everybody’s business, children of today must be appropriately educated and adequately trained to face the disaster risks. Although only education gives the opportunity to implant disaster awareness culture to future citizens, several analytical studies aimed to find strategies to permanently intervene on education, highlights how schools worldwide are strongly unprepared towards natural hazards education (Sinha et al. , 2007; Bernhardsdóttir et al. , 2012; Komac et al. , 2013). Effective actions on education should be permanent and integrative, and cut across all formal and informal educational efforts in close contact with reality (Sinha et al. , 2007). Actions to be taken to improve school mandatory programs are fundamental and long term; they require a strong interaction between science and school world. However best practice examples are more easily run towards informal education. In this framework we discuss examples of informal education towards earthquake and floods threats. The ERiNat project Educazione ai Rischi Naturali (Training on Natural Risks) is an attempt of life-long learning prevention strategies for students from the La Spezia province and, in a domino effect manner, the adults belonging to their families. 446 GNGTS 2013 S essione 2.3