A Remote Sensing Method to Assess the Future Multi-Hazard Exposure of Urban Areas

As more than 75% of the global population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050, there is an urgent need to assess the risk of natural hazards through a future-focused lens so that adequately informed spatial planning decisions can be made to define preventive risk policies in the upcoming decades. The authors propose an innovative methodology to assess the future multi-hazard exposure of urban areas based on remote sensing technologies and statistical and spatial analysis. The authors, specifically, applied remote sensing technologies combined with artificial intelligence to map the built-up area automatically. They assessed and calibrated a transferable Binary Logistic Regression Model (BLRM) to model and predict future urban growth dynamics under different scenarios, such as the business as usual, the slow growth, and the fast growth scenarios. Finally, considering specific socioeconomic exposure indicators, the authors assessed each scenario’s future multi-hazard exposure in urban areas. The proposed methodology is applied to the Municipality of Rende. The results revealed that the multi-hazard exposure significantly changed across the analyzed scenarios and that urban socioeconomic growth is the main driver of risk in urban environments.