Sora Project – A participatory Civil Protection Plan

The project consists of a participatory process to support the development of the municipal Civil Protection Plan. This process included two main phases: on the one hand, it focused on the understanding and awareness of the vulnerabilities and risks of the area and on the other, it discussed the contents of the plan and its improvement to overcome any gaps. To do this, the project used civic involvement methodologies that consider people active and aware protagonists and holders of knowledge not only recipients of training on the procedures to follow in an emergency. Eventually, the approach underlying this process aims to intervene on the level of people ownership in managing response to emergencies.

From2018, the participation of citizens, individual or associated, is ensured in the process of drawing up civil protection planning, according to the Civil Protection Code. The minimum level of territorial planning is represented by the Municipal Plan that must be periodically updated and should include the following areas: general information, planning guidelines and intervention model. The mandatory nature of the Plan is regulated by law and its configuration is governed by guidelines issued by the Department and by the regional structures of Civil Protection. However, despite the Civil Protection Code, there are very few experiences in Italy that provide for the active involvement of people in civil protection planning. This means, for example, that citizens are not very aware both of the risks and vulnerabilities of their own territory and of the procedures to be implemented in the event of an emergency.