Italy

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Italy
The disruptions in Italy’s recent history as a result of natural disasters reveal devastating damages to not only the country’s environment but also its economy and the overall society. Italy records significant loss of properties worth millions of dollars, life and the impact on its environment are evident every time the country experiences some form of a natural disaster. The country is prone to various types of natural hazards that threaten its overall development and sustenance of acquired wealth. This paper evaluates Italy by identifying the nation’s geological characteristics and meteorological factors that leave the country prone to such hazards.
Italy tends to be vulnerable to a variety of natural risks such as earthquakes, mudflows, floods, landslides, tsunamis, storm surges, storms, volcanic eruptions, land subsidence and avalanches. The state’s topography is mountainous and rugged, and the Mediterranean climate tends to be unpredictable. As a result, the country accounts for nearly 9.8 percent of the land at risk to landslide or flood within the Italian turf which affects about 82 percent of the nation’s municipalities. The globe is divided into various main tectonic plates. Italy’s southern region sits above the Eurasian and African plates that meet and grind against each other persistently (ABC News n.p). As a result, ABC News suggests that the grating of these two plates forms volcanic and seismic tensions (n.p). For example, the major volcanoes in Italy such as Vesuvius, Etna, and Stromboli which lie near this fault.

Moreover, the country has several other smaller fault lines, especially ones located in the Appenine Mountains. These mountains also referred to as the Appenine range is a series of ridges running from the northern to the southern part of the country. The range is like Italy’s geographical spine. The earthquakes reported in Norcia and L’ Aquila were situated beneath the central Apennines. The nation experiences comparatively low earthquakes that are moderately frequent along the whole spread of these mountains as a result of the several faults running along the range (ABC News n.p). ABC News adds that the faults are susceptible to rupturing and consequently causing earthquakes (n.p). The continued sinking of the African plate oceanic crust beneath Italy which thus resulted in the formation of significant natural features, for instance, the volcano Mount Vesuvius. Research indicates that the converging rate of these plates is 5mm per annum. The occurrences of complex tectonic movements around are due to several movements, places of weaknesses, and faults in the crust region (ABC News n.p). There is also a recorded expansion of the earth’s crust below the Apennines of western and central parts of Italy which explain the reason behind the place experiencing normal faulting (ABC News n.p).
The center of Italy is also characterized by poorly constructed buildings illegally developed that make the vulnerable to destruction in case of an earthquake (Mesco and Giovanni n.p). In fact, the Mesco and Giovanni indicate that some structures in the majority of urban places in Italy are centuries old and therefore, tremors quickly destroy them (n.p). Over the years, Italy experience with these quakes has caused deaths including nearly 300 people in2009 and 157 in August 2016 and the deadliest in 1908 that claimed about 80,000 lives (Mesco and Giovanni n.p). A report by the OECD indicates that Italy ranks above average in areas like health status, social correlations and work-life balance (n.p). Nevertheless, the country ranks below average in such areas as education and skills, subjective well-being, jobs and earnings, environmental wellbeing, housing and civic engagement (OECD n.p). These factors mainly civil engineering and shelter explains the extent of disasters usually associated with natural calamities.

Works Cited
ABC.net. “Explainer: Italy’s History Of Earthquake Destruction”. ABC News. N.p., 2016. Web. 2
Dec. 2016.
Mesco, Manuela and Giovanni Legorano. “Earthquake Exposes Italy’S Disaster Vulnerabilities
And Shortcomings”. Wall Street Journal. N.p., 2016. Web. 2 Dec. 2016.
OECD. “OECD Better Life Index”. Oecdbetterlifeindex.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Dec. 2016.