The PRIM Programme: a Regional Plan for Integrated Risk Assessment and Management.

The Lombardy Region has recently launched a project (PRIM - Regional Plan for the Risk Governance) aimed to an integrated risk assessment as a decision support for local policies of risk prevention and management. The project has been developed and coordinated by the Lombardy Foundation for the Environment in cooperation with universities and research institutions of the region. Eight majors risks have been considered: natural (floods-landslides, meteorological extreme events, forest fires, earthquakes), technological (relevant industrial accidents, transport of dangerous substances) and social risks (labor accidents, road accidents, urban security). For each of them, hazard factors as well as vulnerability elements for selected targets have been calculated, weighted and combined with proper algorithms in order to obtain GIS-based risk maps with a fine space resolution (1 km2 square cells). The individual risk maps have been overlapped and integrated achieving a final integrated risk map capable to select the most critical areas throughout the region, to which specific policies of prevention and /or mitigation of the major risks ought to be addressed.