Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale, Trieste, Italia

Although earthquakes are a threat in many countries and considerable resources have been invested in safety regulations, communities at risk often lack awareness and preparedness. Risk communication is a key tool for building resilient communities, raising awareness, and increasing preparedness. Over the past 2 decades, seismic risk communication has evolved significantly. This has led to a reorientation from a predominantly “one-way”, top-down communication model to the promotion of new models in which people, their needs, and their participation in disaster risk management are central elements. The 2015–2030 Sendai Framework recommendations, recent disaster experiences and research have highlighted that new models can improve communication effectiveness. In this paper, we critically explore this transition by conducting a scoping review (n=109 publications) of seismic risk communication in Europe. We analyse the approaches, messages, tools, and channels used for seismic risk communication and how they have changed over time. The results reveal that the stated goals of seismic risk communication are, in decreasing order, to share information, raise awareness, change behaviours/beliefs, and increase preparedness. Pupils, students, and citizens are the primary recipients of communication activities. Over the years, two trends have emerged. First, “two-way”, transdisciplinary and bottom-up communication models prevailed over the “one-way” model. Second, communication aimed more at promoting proactive behaviours than just informing the public. Face-to-face, hands-on activities, and serious games are key tools to engage with the public. The results also reveal the emerging role of social media to target different audiences/social groups. Strikingly, only one-fifth of the analysed publications explicitly build on or tests risk communication theories. Future research could focus on comparing practices across countries and risks (e.g., earthquakes and floods) and on innovating communication theories and methodologies, especially by incorporating the role of information technologies and social media.

In recent years, new approaches for developing earthquake rupture forecasts (ERFs) have been proposed to be used as an input for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA). Zone- based approaches with seismicity rates derived from earthquake catalogs are commonly used in many countries as the standard for national seismic hazard models. In Italy, a single zone- based ERF is currently the basis for the official seismic hazard model. In this contribution, we present eleven new ERFs, including five zone-based, two smoothed seismicity-based, two fault- based, and two geodetic-based, used for a new PSH model in Italy. The ERFs were tested against observed seismicity and were subject to an elicitation procedure by a panel of PSHA experts to verify the scientific robustness and consistency of the forecasts with respect to the observations. Tests and elicitation were finalized to weight the ERFs. The results show a good response to the new inputs to observed seismicity in the last few centuries. The entire approach was a first attempt to build a community-based set of ERFs for an Italian PSHA model. The project involved a large number of seismic hazard practitioners, with their knowledge and experience, and the development of different models to capture and explore a large range of epistemic uncertainties in building ERFs, and represents an important step forward for the new national seismic hazard model.