Risk and Organizational Learning. the Case of Genoa and Messina Floods.
Risk and Organizational Learning. the Case of Genoa and Messina Floods.
Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 12:30
Location: ASJE024 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
Oral Presentation
The city of Genoa in Italy has been flooded at least 11 times since 1970. Messina 5 times. More or less severe episodes of extreme rainfall followed by flooding by rivers and torrents affect other major national metropolitan areas almost every year. In terms of victims and economic losses, the damage caused by these events is dramatic.
Global warming has increased the severity and frequency of these events, but the cause of these tragedies is not only the increase in cumulative rainfall, but also the legacy of urbanisation processes close to the banks of watercourses, poor maintenance of canals, lack of risk awareness among the population and other socio-economic and infrastructural factors.
Although important progress has been made in terms of preparedness, particularly with regard to weather forecasting, the socio-technical systems responsible for risk prevention and management have not always proved capable of learning from past mistakes. There is therefore an urgent need to reflect on what contextual factors and patterns of action enable such systems to be resilient or, on the contrary, to fail.
The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a comparative analysis of flood risk management in three Italian cities that have been affected by at least two severe floods in the last twenty years: Genoa and Messina. The research, carried out by an interdisciplinary team, produced two main results: the construction of a method for identifying cases, based on a composite index of environmental, meteorological and socio-economic data; and the identification of good and bad practices of risk learning, as well as factors that facilitate or hinder such learning.
The research was carried out in the framework of the RETURN Extended Partnership, funded by the Italian Government and the European Commission, and aimed at improving the management of natural, environmental and climate risks.
Global warming has increased the severity and frequency of these events, but the cause of these tragedies is not only the increase in cumulative rainfall, but also the legacy of urbanisation processes close to the banks of watercourses, poor maintenance of canals, lack of risk awareness among the population and other socio-economic and infrastructural factors.
Although important progress has been made in terms of preparedness, particularly with regard to weather forecasting, the socio-technical systems responsible for risk prevention and management have not always proved capable of learning from past mistakes. There is therefore an urgent need to reflect on what contextual factors and patterns of action enable such systems to be resilient or, on the contrary, to fail.
The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a comparative analysis of flood risk management in three Italian cities that have been affected by at least two severe floods in the last twenty years: Genoa and Messina. The research, carried out by an interdisciplinary team, produced two main results: the construction of a method for identifying cases, based on a composite index of environmental, meteorological and socio-economic data; and the identification of good and bad practices of risk learning, as well as factors that facilitate or hinder such learning.
The research was carried out in the framework of the RETURN Extended Partnership, funded by the Italian Government and the European Commission, and aimed at improving the management of natural, environmental and climate risks.