Methods for Risk Reduction: Training and Exercises to Pursue the Planned Evacuation

Natural and anthropic disasters produce relevant economic and environmental losses at a global level. Many countries have adopted a risk management cycle to limit these losses. Agenda 2030 defined specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and relative targets dedicated to disaster risk reduction. Planned actions can pertain to the context “before” or “after” a disastrous event. The United Nations recommend a risk-informed approach for achieving the SDGs by working on anticipation and prevention. Planning with training and exercises, referring to transport systems in emergency conditions, can limit disaster impacts and strongly support the pursuit of sustainability. This research focuses on actions and methodologies for increasing preparedness levels “before” a disastrous event, to improve the capabilities of managers and people by increasing awareness of the effects of planned actions. Transport system models (TSMs) play an important role in simulating the evacuation of people to reduce theoretical risk, thereby reducing theoretical exposure. In this work, a method is presented that allows us to investigate how this theoretical reduction can become effective, through training and exercises. The paper proposes a general framework of training and exercises for risk reduction based on a given transportation planning model. The framework supports ex ante evaluations of exposure reduction produced by an evacuation plan. The obtained results show that the effectiveness of the planned actions increases with different levels of exercise implementation. The progressive implementation of exercises contributes to achieving the risk reductions estimated at the evacuation planning stage. The TSM in the mitigation phase is the basis for the development of specific quantitative evacuation plans, that must be implemented in the preparedness phase by means of training and exercises to test the planned actions in terms of reducing the exposure risk component. Some exercises implemented worldwide verify the proposed framework by means of some empirical evidence. The results and discussions reported in this paper can be useful for researchers, decisionmakers, and society by offering a contribution to the growing knowledge about risk and the potential actions and their relative effects on reducing it.