Risks and Landscapes: exploring relationships and opportunities in the Campania Region

Risks, even the so-called “natural” ones, are nowadays more and more clearly identified as the result of the interaction among natural processes and the complex dynamics of territorial transformation, induced by social, economic and spatial dynamics, which largely contribute to determine their vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, the European Landscape Convention, released on October 2000, provided a definition of landscape as “part of the land, as perceived by local people or visitors, which evolves through time as a result of being acted upon by natural forces and human beings”. Both these definitions lead us to state: first of all, that landscapes evolve/change due to human activities which may contribute to increase landscapes’ vulnerability to the different hazard factors they are exposed to; secondly, that landscapes evolve/change due to the occurrence of natural and man-made hazards which may induce significant changes on natural, rural, urban landscapes; thirdly, that risk prevention or reconstruction measures may act as further factors of landscapes’ change, which sometimes irreversibly alter the features and identity of landscapes. However, although the numerous potential relationships between landscape dynamics and risks, they have been so far poorly addressed, with a prevailing focus on the relationship between human pressures and landscapes’ decay. In this contribution, with reference to the Campania Region, we will address the different relationships between risks and landscapes by providing examples related both to landscape’s transformations, which result into an increase of their vulnerability and, in turn, of risk levels and on the role played by risk reduction measures or reconstruction activities in modifying/altering Campania’s landscapes