Social vulnerability to natural disasters in the EEA and UK: a systematic review with insights for risk reduction and emergency planning

The interaction between natural hazards and the socio-economic environment implies multidisciplinary assessments that aim to integrate the physical and the socio-economic features of the affected territories. The quantification and mapping of social vulnerability, coupled with hazard assessment, could be a useful approach to support risk management strategies. With this aim, we carried on a systematic review on the role of social vulnerability in the natural hazard literature in the European Economic Area (EEA) and United Kingdom (UK) over the last twenty years. The various definitions, measurements and mapping of social vulnerability were studied, providing an instrument for conducting hazard assessment and demonstrating the relevance of multidisciplinary approach in disasters research. The PRISMA methodology and frequency analysis were used to extract and analyze the literature. According to our selection criteria, 95 papers were included in the final analysis. Results (Figure 1) revealed that: i) 53 % of papers focuses on social vulnerability related to flood hazard, ii) 61 % of case studies include hazard assessment, while the rest only investigate the socio-economic component of vulnerability, iii) Portugal and Italy are the most investigated countries, iv) 51,6 % of papers carry out an integrated approach. The review underlines a pronounced perception of the scientific community to the more recurrent events (floods) rather than to the number of deaths (heat waves). The gap of studies that analyze social vulnerability to volcanic eruption is a relevant example as only 3 significant volcanic activities and 0 deaths were registered in the last twenty years. Moreover, this study underlines the high need of multidisciplinary approach (Earth, Social, Economic, Engineering Sciences) in the context of disaster management and risk reduction strategies. The review represents a methodological manual for all those who works on data integration in risk analysis or emergency planning. For this reason, a scheme of data integration between hazard, vulnerability and exposure is proposed (Table 1). Starting from the main results, the review provides a broader look at future research developments in the field of climate change and emergency planning pointing out the need to improve integration methods and the development of territorial socio-economic indicators.