In the civil protection system, every decision is an act of responsibility. It is for the mayor who signs an evacuation order, for the technician who issues a forecast of heavy rainfall, and for the official who communicates an alert. But what does “responsibility” truly mean in a context where nature is unpredictable, scientific knowledge is probabilistic, and societal expectations oscillate between complete delegation and the search for someone to blame? These questions are the starting point of the legal series Civil Protection and Responsibility, published by Edizioni ETS and now fully accessible in open access.
Born from a reflective process initiated over fifteen years ago by CIMA Research Foundation, the series aims to explore legal responsibility in the risk society, bringing together scientists, legal scholars, decision-makers, and civil protection professionals. This interdisciplinary dialogue has concretely influenced the culture and regulations of the sector, contributing to the drafting of the 2018 Civil Protection Code. Each volume is a piece of this journey, which does not seek to simplify complexity but to make it understandable and usable for those working daily in risk prevention and management. “This series has the merit of building a bridge between law and operations. It makes legal knowledge accessible to those who must make decisions in planning, but also in real time, allowing the civil protection system to be more aware, more efficient, and ultimately, fairer,” says lawyer Marco Altamura, legal advisor and programme director of CIMA Research Foundation.
A law rooted in practice
As Franco Gabrielli, Head of the Civil Protection Department from 2010 to 2015, emphasized in the introduction to one of the volumes, the series stems from a real and concrete need: to respond to the growing tension between scientific forecasting and legal assessment.
“There has been a significant increase in judicial actions that, following a disaster, investigate not only behavior after the event but also the actions taken beforehand, regarding forecasting and information management,” observed Gabrielli. This development has brought about concerns, uncertainties, and the need to develop new interpretative tools capable of overcoming the misalignment between languages, roles, and responsibilities.
It is precisely in this context that CIMA Research Foundation initiated pioneering work: collecting regulations, rulings, and operational practices to turn them into something alive and useful. In this vision, law is no longer an external and punitive code, but a lens through which to understand and improve the system. As explained by Francesca Munerol, researcher in the Planning and Procedures Department at CIMA Research Foundation: “It’s not just about complying with the law, but about internalizing that the law creates a system of responsibilities, which must be understood and known to become stronger, more aware, and therefore more efficient operators. What we aim to achieve through the study of laws and rulings is to build an ecosystem of shared knowledge to use with the various professionals we work with, so that we can all move away from the fear of the law and judgment and fully harness its guiding potential.”
The idea that a ruling, though tied to a specific case, can have normative and educational value for the entire system is one of the project’s key insights.
From courtrooms to operations rooms
In the series’ volumes, legal experts and professionals jointly explore what it means to plan, decide, and act under uncertainty. Legal reflection is interwoven with concrete examples, such as the one provided by Luca Ferraris, president of CIMA Research Foundation, in his contribution on the Bisagno creek case in Genoa. The progressive urbanization of the floodplain, culminating in the covering of the creek and six severe floods over the past century, exemplifies the challenges civil protection faces today: exposed territories, difficult decisions, complex responsibilities.
Ferraris proposes a distinction between risks that can be managed with structural interventions — embankments, relocations, urban planning — and “residual” risks, which remain under the responsibility of the alert system and civil protection. But often, he notes, the latter is expected to bear the full burden of risk, even in the absence of adequate mitigation, thus exposing itself to a disproportionate level of responsibility.
In such cases, the legal reflection of the series becomes a strategic tool. Law is not just there to judge after the fact, but to guide beforehand. As demonstrated by the analysis work conducted by CIMA Research Foundation together with Functional Centers and Regional Environmental Agencies, which led to the revision of operational procedures in line with the most relevant court rulings. It is a way to anticipate the questions of the judiciary and make the system more solid, better prepared, and more accountable.
Towards new risks, new governance, and a shared culture of responsibility
The work continues. Today, CIMA Research Foundation’s research also embraces the challenge of drought, an emerging risk that has only recently been incorporated into the civil protection system. The goal, explain the Foundation’s legal experts, is not to create new laws but to understand the existing ones, systematize them, and contribute to building more effective governance. Once again, law is a tool for prevention, not just for judgment.
The experience gained in managing hydrometeorological risks thus becomes a heritage to be transferred to new fronts, using the same method: dialogue between disciplines, analysis of laws and rulings, and operational sharing. It is a process that requires time, dedication, and collective effort, but which has already yielded clear results.
The open access publication of the series represents another step in this direction. Each volume is now freely available, providing mayors, technicians, students, and citizens with a wealth of knowledge that can improve the quality of decisions, reduce risk, and strengthen the system’s legitimacy.
After all, as Gabrielli reminded us in his preface, “Civil Protection is bound to facts.” It doesn’t work with images, but with landslides, mud, real lives. That’s why it needs rational, shared, and reliable tools. The Civil Protection and Responsibility series is one of those tools. A permanent laboratory where law, science, and operations come together to shape a culture of responsibility that is not only post-disaster, but pre-event. Not only defensive, but constructive. Not only for judges and lawyers, but for everyone.