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Water vulnerability in Piura, northern Peru, is shaped by structural, climatic and governance factors. Surface water from the Chira, Huancabamba and Piura basins is stored and conveyed through major reservoirs (Poechos and San Lorenzo) and canals (Daniel Escobar, Miguel Checa), while service and storage infrastructure is denser on the coast than in the highlands. This study adapts and operationalizes Escribano’s multidimensional scarcity framework—originally developed for the Gulf of Guinea—into a provincial-scale water-vulnerability index for Piura. Structural, climatic-exposure and institutional-capacity indicators from official statistics are min–max normalized to 0–1, aggregated into dimension indices as arithmetic means, and combined with equal weights. All indicators, normalization procedures and aggregation rules are documented, and the resulting indices are mapped with GIS to reveal intra-regional disparities. Findings show that highland provinces such as Ayabaca and Morropón exhibit higher composite vulnerability than coastal provinces, due to persistent poverty, predominantly rural settlement patterns and weaker governance capacity. Some coastal provinces, notably Paita and Sechura, also display elevated vulnerability, whereas Piura and Sullana score lower despite higher demand. Overall, vulnerability appears to be driven more by socio-institutional asymmetries than by physical availability, providing a transparent screening tool for adaptive, territorial water governance.

This article investigates the potential of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data in predicting local well-being and resilience in Italy. The linear Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) is used to handle multicollinearity problems and select the most influential OSM features. The data-driven approach provides evidence that OSM information is highly correlated with several socioeconomic metrics at a provincial scale (NUTS-3 level). Moreover, it claims that some specific points of interest—e.g., bookmakers—can be used for a rapid territorial appraisal of vulnerable territories, i.e., areas that are affected by economic backwardness, poor institutions, low human capital and that, for these adverse conditions, deserve special attention by policymakers concerned with a reduction of regional disparities. While OSM can become a powerful source for policy planning, monitoring and evaluation, future works in the field should explore the scalability of the approach, its use for forecasting purposes, and the adoption of various models and tools such as machine learning techniques to grasp even non-linear relationships between variables.

Food insecurity is not merely an outcome of individual deprivation but a place-based expression of how urban food systems operate within unequal socio-spatial contexts. Using the Drivers–Pressures–State–Impacts–Responses (DPSIR) framework as a policy-relevant analytical lens, this study examines the Metropolitan Region of Rome to show how structural inequalities and uneven food infrastructures shape exposure to food-related risks. The results show that vulnerability is amplified by food price inflation, the rising cost of a healthy diet, and spatial gaps in retail provision—captured through the combined presence of food deserts and food blackouts—disproportionately affecting peripheral municipalities. State indicators, including the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), the Food Affordability Index (FAI), and the spatial distribution of FEAD beneficiaries, reveal a markedly uneven geography of food poverty, mirroring a higher prevalence of overweight, obesity, and diabetes. These spatial configurations point to obesogenic environments in which constrained affordability and limited accessibility restrict the capacity to maintain healthy diets, generating hidden social and health costs that disproportionately burden peripheral areas. Overall, food insecurity in Rome follows a pronounced centre–periphery gradient rooted in structural and institutional arrangements rather than incidental variation. Addressing this condition requires place-based, justice-oriented interventions that strengthen food infrastructures, improve coordination across governance scales, and place food security at the core of an integrated metropolitan Food Policy.

The paper addresses the issue of migration towards inner areas with respect to the broader framework of the National Strategy for Inland Areas (SNAI). After an introduction on the purpose outlined by the SNAI, the article focuses on the relationship between socio-economic features of the inner areas and migration dynamics, in order to outline some preconditions for the presence of foreigners as active driver for the regeneration of those marginal territories. Thus, a theoretical paradigm has been proposed to address the evaluation process and support the whole policy cycle. Il contributo affronta il tema della migrazione nelle aree interne del paese nel più ampio quadro della Strategia Nazionale delle Aree Interne (SNAI). Dopo un’introduzione sulla traiettoria delineata dalla SNAI, l’articolo si concentra sulla relazione tra caratteri socio-economici delle aree interne e dinamiche migratorie, al fine di delineare alcune condizioni perché la presenza di stranieri eserciti una forza rigenerativa dei territori al margine e di definire un paradigma teorico per orientare la valutazione a supporto dell’intero ciclo delle politiche.

New challenges in flood risk management are raised by climate change and land-use development. These challenges are particularly complex in estuarine and coastal systems, where different hazard sources interact in a dynamic socio-economic context. This paper presents an innovative approach to support flood risk management in estuaries. The approach, developed at a local-scale basis, is applied in the case study of the Tagus estuary (Portugal). The methodology is supported by the regional framing of the study area and integrates hazard, exposed elements, territorial vulnerability and risk assessments considering different climate scenarios. Through the involvement of the various risk management dimensions, the results allow the definition of a new decision-making supporting framework for emergency and land-use planning. At the emergency level, the results include a WebGIS interface providing an early warning system for the locations with highest risk of flooding and the definition of emergency planning guidelines. A set of flood adaptation actions based on land-use and occupation measures are recommended to increase resilience in face of flooding and future sea level rise. The institutional capacity-building is achieved through the availability of information and tools that can effectively support decision-making. Additionally, the outcomes contribute to better understand flood risk in estuaries and to strengthen its prevention, preparedness and response, priorities defined in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030.

The concept of social vulnerability is widely studied in literature in order to identify particularly socially fragile sectors of the population. For this purpose, several studies have adopted indexes to measure the economic and social conditions of the population. The aim of this paper is to investigate the link between social and territorial vulnerability and the real estate market, by means of an exploratory analysis related to the possibility that spatial analyses can help to identify spatial latent components and variables in the process of price determination. A three phase approach is proposed, using the geographical segmentation of Turin and its related submarkets as a case study. After the identification and analysis of a set of three social and territorial vulnerability indicators, a traditional hedonic approach was applied to measure their influence on property listing prices. Subsequently, spatial analyses were investigated to focus on the spatial components of the indicators and property prices; their spatial autocorrelation was measured and the presence of spatial dependence was taken into account by applying a spatial regression. Results demonstrated that two indicators were spatially correlated with property prices and had a significant and negative influence on them. The proposed approach may help not only to identify the most vulnerable urban areas characterized by the lowest property prices, but also to support the future modification to the actual geographical segmentation of Turin.

Risk is currently considered as a function of hazard and the exposure of assets, depending on their vulnerability, on an area within which a disaster could occur. However, in France, technological risk management is shared between a technician management focused on hazard, where assets are identified only from direct exposure, and vulnerability assessment of the assets, which are rarely incorporated in their entirety. Early studies, which tried to take into account these two parts of management, are limited, as a result of incomplete identification of assets and their vulnerabilities. An absence or an inadequate combination between hazard and the vulnerability of assets is also frequently observed. Indeed, they are mainly based on the combination of territorial vulnerability through quantification of the hazard, which is not unproblematic: the characterisation of the hazard, translated into quality criteria in terms of technological hazards, is not a linear relation. To solve these problems, a geographical information system-based methodology is therefore suggested in this study, where hazard perimeters are combined with the vulnerabilities of the exposed assets in a qualitative way. It is based on a process that uses geospatial operations and a specific semiology to provide an efficient mapping of the global risk. This methodology could be applied to any kind of territory, hazard and assets, to produce operational and useful knowledge of technological risk cartography. It can also be considered as a first step to a more global Natech risk assessment, since floods may cause severe damages to the local industrial facilities and trigger major accidents involving human, material and environmental assets.

Seismic risk assessment at the territorial level is now widely recognised as essential for countries with intense seismic activity, such as Italy. Academia is called to give its contribution in order to synergically deepen the knowledge about the various components of this risk, starting from the complex evaluation of vulnerability of the built heritage. In line with this, a mechanics-based seismic fragility model for Italian residential masonry buildings was developed and presented in this paper. This model is based on the classification of the building stock in macro-typologies, defined by age of construction and number of storeys, which being information available at national level, allow simulating damage scenarios and carrying out risk analyses on a territorial scale. The model is developed on the fragility of over 500 buildings, sampled according to national representativeness criteria and analysed through the Vulnus_4.0 software. The calculated fragility functions were extended on the basis of a reference model available in the literature, which provides generic fragilities for the EMS98 vulnerability classes, thus obtaining a fragility model defined on the five EMS98 damage states. Lastly, to assess the reliability of the proposed model, this was used to simulate damage scenarios due to the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. Overall, the comparison between model results and observed damage showed a good fit, proving the model effectiveness.

En la Región Metropolitana de Santiago se encuentran pequeños asentamientos humanos rurales, entre los cuales existen entidades rurales en condiciones de mayor aislamiento físico, debido a una serie de factores geográficos. Estos generalmente se encuentran al margen de la mayoría de las políticas públicas e inversión privada. La presente investigación tiene por objetivos: determinar las entidades rurales con mayor grado de aislamiento, identificar la vulnerabilidad de dichas entidades y realizar una propuesta inicial de objetivos de desarrollo territorial, aplicando un índice de aislamiento fisicogeografico, una encuesta y el método de marco lógico. Se concluye que este es un fenómeno espacial manifestado en cualquier territorio, incluso en regiones con áreas metropolitanas, y que la problemática identificada es de carácter multidimensional con una distribución territorial claramente diferenciada.