Resilience assessment at the regional level using census data

Over the last decade, the topic of regional resilience has drawn the attention of public authorities due to the increasing number of natural disasters. The absence of a practical and concrete methodology makes it extremely difficult to evaluate resilience at the regional scale, which involves several concepts such as economics, social sciences, environment, etc. This paper proposes an indicator-based approach to assess the resilience assessment of Italian regions. A set of twelve indicators has been selected among publicly available census data. A time window of ten years was considered in the analysis. Three different resilience indexes were calculated for each region. The first is an overall measure of resilience, while the other two represent resilience during the emergency and the restoration phase following a disaster. Results highlight fundamental aspects that have a higher impact on regional resilience and can be used by decision-makers to effectively allocate resources. The procedure has also been extended to evaluate the regional epidemic risk which can be used as a preliminary tool to develop risk mitigation strategies against biological hazards.