Desertification or Resilience and Sustainability Research for the Vesuvius area?

Abstract:

Vesuvius is one the best studied and monitored volcanoes on Earth, but the populations which surround it have not benefited from the research that would produce their habitats resilient and sustainable to future eruptions. There is no official risk management strategy that would accomplish such goals and the best that the government and mass media have been able to do is to promote for the past 20 years an emergency evacuation plan of geologists. Such a plan is practically unreliable and culturally unacceptable. It requires the issuance of an evacuation order three weeks before an eruption and the relocation all over Italy of about one million people surrounding the volcano, without addressing the issues of mass exodus, resettlement of population, protection of the evacuated territory, and reentry. This strategy gives a license to territorial managers to postpone indefinitely any territorial intervention leading to resilience and sustainability and promotes desertification of the Vesuvius area. In 1995 an interdisciplinary research project called VESUVIUS 2000 (www.gvess.org) was submitted to the European Union for a support, but it was rejected on the grounds that it interferes with the evacuation plan. This project aimed at producing by 2000 a feasibility plan of territorial interventions leading to the resilience and sustainability by requiring the accomplishment of five interdisciplinary goals (VESUVIUS PENTALOGUE) that would delineate the exclusion, resilience, and sustainability areas around the volcano. According to this risk reducing strategy, there is no need to produce the destruction of Vesuvius area culture and deal with the unreliability of long-term eruption prediction. It allows the population to prepare for an eruption and aims at producing a resilient and prosperous territory. It is unfortunate for the populations surrounding Vesuvius, and for the natural hazards research in particular, that the path towards resilience and sustainability is being obstructed by the narrow-mindedness and special interests which nurture themselves on this misfortune.