LAUSR

Abstract Buildings located in mountainous areas are prone to be damaged by hydro-meteorological events, such as landslides and floods. The assessment of the physical vulnerability (PV) of the exposed built environment is a key factor in geo-hazard-related risk mitigation. The latter requires the knowledge of the event magnitude and building characteristics. For areas where scarce or no records of the past events are available, indicators-based methodologies are used, allowing to estimate the component of the PV that only depends on the building properties (susceptibility). In this view, this paper gives an overview of the indicators most used in literature, with a novel indicator-by-indicator approach; then, five of them are selected for a sample area located in a mountainous zone in southern Italy, prone to landslide and debris flood events. The chosen indicators are: Structural typology, State of maintenance, Building orientation, Number of floors and Number of facades with large openings, for each of which multiple configurations are defined and weighed, in reason of the expected ability of the considered configuration to withstand in case of calamity. This approach has several advantages, such as user-friendliness, flexibility of use, possibility of being updated over time and helpfulness for further purposes.