Sustainability, risks, land use planning: tools for integration

In the last decades, urban areas have been more and more frequently hit by hazards with catastrophic impacts on human and natural resources. According to Mitchell [1], urban disasters are often characterized as “an interactive mix of natural, technological and social events”, due to changes of hazards, exposure and vulnerability of territorial systems and to the interactive mix of such changes [2]. These issues are critical both for urban planning and sustainable development, since hazards pose a relevant threat both to the development of cities and to the safeguard of human and natural resources for the benefit of future generations. Accordingly, the need for integrating both environmental and disaster risk considerations into spatial planning has been largely emphasized [3, 4]. Since the Eighties, the role played by environmental issues in land use planning has been consistently growing in all European countries. Nowadays, almost all land use planning processes have to be subjected to a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). On the opposite, Disasters Risk Reduction still represents a marginal goal in land use planning. Risk assessment and prevention is mainly faced through sectoral planning tools, based on a hazard oriented approach and devoting scarce attention to the vulnerability of human and natural resources. Furthermore, risk features as well as the potential impacts of planning policies on such features are often neglected within the SEAs. To face these criticalities, a new tool, the SERA, which could largely contribute to an effective integration of Risk Assessment (RA) into the SEA has been provided. This tool is addressed to support land use planners in evaluating the impact that land use planning choices might have on environmental features of the territory, including risks.