Design Educational Activities of Seismic Risk Reduction, by Considering Risk Perception Data

Abstract

In the modern society of risk (U. Beck, 1986), risk reduction education projects and awareness campaigns play, always more frequently, a central and relevant role. The last twenty five years have witnessed a flourishing of studies, research projects, educational experiments and actions to reduce natural risks. Just remember, for example, International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, which basic objective was to decrease the loss of life, property destruction and social and economic disruption caused by natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, droughts, locust infestations, and other disasters of natural origin (https://www.unisdr.org/who-we-are/history). Our principal experiences in risk reduction activities, gained in over 15 years, concerned: - EDURISK, an educational project for risk reduction addressed to schools and teachers. Explicit objective of EDURISK is to promote risk awareness and the active role of citizens in its reduction; therefore a goal of social change (http://www.earth-prints.org/bitstream/2122/8741/1/miscellanea13_2012_edurisk.pdf); - education and psychosocial activities realized with students, teachers and citizens in the post emergencies of L’Aquila (2009) and in the Po Plain (2012); - training activity for the Civil Protection volunteers involved in the Io non Rischio campaign. One of the most relevant problems in all these activities for risk reduction is the assessment process. To have the tools and be able to consider the right variables to understand if the activities put in place produced desired outcomes. We arrived to the conclusion that the process knowledge-awareness-action never occur automatically, within an educational process, but this process must be accompanied in the direction of doing. To facilitate this process, it is necessary to understand better what are the elements and factors that influence it. In this sense, the data collected in recent years, on risk perception may represent good basis to identify the key-points to active the process knowledge-awareness-action. In this paper we process data on the seismic risk perception (over 9,000 responses distributed throughout the Italian territory) to obtain useful information to build an educational project. Our method consists of identify principal variables that influence risk perception scores and use it to design risk reduction activities. By this method, we think to realize an educational design able to valorize those factors that promote social change for risk reduction.