Can high-school students contribute to seismic risk mitigation? Lessons learned from the development of a crowd-sourced exposure database

On a global scale, one out of three people is exposed to earthquakes, and most injuries and deaths in case of seismic events are caused by the damage or collapse of residential buildings. Knowing the type and distribution of exposed assets, in particular buildings, is thus paramount for effective mitigation of disasters. Citizens’ involvement in disaster risk reduction activities is constantly increasing by means of crowdsourced data collection, education/training and citizen science activities. In particular, schools have a central role in engaging young students and increasing risk awareness and preparedness. In this work, we explored whether students’ participation in this kind of activities can lead to the improvement of current exposure datasets, while increasing citizens’ risk-related understanding. In 2021, due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics - OGS started a new project to be deployed in fully remote mode, named “CEDAS: building CEnsus for seismic Damage ASsessment”. The project consists in the collection and elaboration of crowdsourced data on main residential buildings typologies of northeastern Italy, a seismically active area which suffered consequences from strong past earthquakes. During the project, 170 high school students collected reports on more than 3200 buildings, performing a statistical analysis of theing results. The CEDAS project makes a first step beyond crowdsourcing activities and applies citizen science to exposure development. Results allow identifying the most common building typologies in the region and the challenges and opportunities associated with data collection and analysis. The experience collected during the CEDAS project shows that crowdsourcing and citizen science activities can contribute to both enhancing the exposure data available for the scientific community and increasing risk awareness among young students in the region.