This systematic review aims to synthesise Web-GIS evidence for managing natural hazards to share state-of-the-art practices and policies. A comprehensive search in SCOPUS, among other databases, identified 1775 articles published between 2014 and 2023. Following a selection process based on the PRISMA model, 65 articles met the inclusion criteria. The analysis revealed a growing trend over the past decade, with most research concentrated in the last three years. Eight crucial subtopics within the Web-GIS domain have emerged: Integrated Spatial Analysis and Modelling, Technologies and Infrastructure, Visualisation and User Interface Design, Decision Support Systems, Real-time Monitoring and Early Warning, Disaster Recovery and Resilience, Citizen and Social Media Integration, and Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration. A substantial contribution of the literature has been identified in Decision Support Systems and Integrated Spatial Analysis, reflecting their vital role in strategising and predicting hazard impacts. Furthermore, a geographical distribution analysis revealed significant Web-GIS applications in countries like Italy and China, alongside a deficit in low- and middle-income countries. It also highlights potential gaps in hazard studies, including the need to prioritise heatwave management in the face of climate change. This research calls for policymakers and practitioners to leverage evidence-informed decision making and foster community collaboration for enhanced natural disaster resilience.

In the last decades, climate and environmental changes have highlighted the fragility and vulnerability of the landscape, especially in mountain areas where the effects are most severe. This study promotes the methodological setup of a landscape digital twin to establish a multi-disciplinary and multi-scalar hazard overview according to a matrix framework implementable over time and space. The original contribution to the research addresses a holistic vision that combines meaningfully qualitative with quantitative approaches within a multi-hazard framework from the socio-economic perspective. This contribution presents road network risk analysis by exploiting flooding and landslide scenarios. The critical road segments or nodes most vulnerable or impacted by network performance and accessibility can be identified with minimal preprocessing from credible open-source sources. Service maps are used to show the spatial distribution of risk scores for different typologies of points of interest and hazards. Origin-destination matrix graphs display changes in travel time between facilities under various scenarios. Using a risk scores formula to generate risk maps has made it possible to effectively represent the interconnectedness among natural hazards, infrastructure, and socio-economic factors, fostering more resilient decision-making processes. The method’s applicability is tested through a case study in northern Italy’s Piedmont Region.

When you think about the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry people tend to refers to new buildings, but nowadays the recovery of existing ones is increasingly the subject of the research. The current historical context raises this issue at the center of numerous thought due both to economic and environmental conditions. So, the need to refurbish the cultural heritage is becoming more important than the construction of new buildings. Modern technologies allow professionals to do this to turn the buildings into structures capable to meet the users' confort with a considerable energy saving. Italy is trying to make a change to the construction industry through the national InnovANCE project, which aims to develop the first national database able to share information among professionals through the help of Building Information Modeling (BIM). In this way the subject involved in a construction process can update their way of working, with a consequent time and cost saving. This paper aims to present the way in which the InnovANCE project can be considered as the key for Italy to change the way to conceive the building industry, using a case study such as the old thermal power of Politecnico di Torino, starting from the survey step. The methodology followed to obtain the 3D model will be described, starting from the data of a topographic and a laser scanner survey and from an archival documents research.

This article aims to study the political, environmental and economic factors in contemporary society that influence new approaches and decision making in design in terms of carbon emissions and energy employment. These issues are increasingly influencing political decision making and public policy throughout every aspect of society, including the design practice. Managing this kind of complexity means adopting new forms of collaboration, methodologies and tools, knowledge and technology sharing. The article aims to narrate a PhD research experience grounded in academy–industry collaboration and aimed at creating a digital methodology for impact evaluation and investment planning. In particular, the digital methodology focuses on responding to international public policy for the sustainable growth of cities, in terms of footprint and energy demand, by including a holistic view of the design process made possible by the use of life-cycle assessment (LCA) procedures. To simplify the calculation, the methodology focuses on the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) data rather than the entire LCA. The EPD is a document that describes the environmental impacts linked to the production of a specific quantity of product or service. The objective was not to create another evaluation method but to employ the EPD results in combination with parametric and computational procedures. The integration of those procedures by using visual programming and scripting allowed the calculation of Embodied Carbon and Embodied Energy and created a user-friendly interface to query the results. The output obtained included automatic and dynamic diagrams able to identify impact scenarios in terms of CO₂ emissions and MJ of embodied energy after the conceptual design stage. The strategic use of the charts lies in their potential to simulate impact conditions and, therefore, in the chance to create sustainable transformation scenarios in the early stages of design. At this point, the influence on choices is at its highest, and the costs are low. Moreover, the methodology represents a platform of collaboration that potentially increases the level of interaction between the actors of the construction process with the consequent improvement in design quality. In conclusion, building the design methodology and testing its performance within a specific sociotechnical context was important in critically evaluating certain topics, for example, the recent European strategies on new technology to reach sustainable objectives, the role of digital tools in proposing solutions towards contemporary social issues, the birth of new forms of partnership and collaboration and the new possibilities coming from digital evaluation approaches.

The advent of new mobile mapping systems that integrate different sensors has made it easier to acquire multiple 3D information with high speed. Today, technological development has allowed the creation of portable systems particularly suitable for indoor surveys, which mainly integrating LiDAR devices, chambers and inertial platforms, make it possible to create in a fast and easy way, full 3D model of the environment. However, the performance of these instruments differs depending on the acquisition context (indoor and outdoor), the characteristics of the scene (for example lighting, the presence of objects and people, reflecting surfaces, textures) and, above all, the mapping and localization algorithms implemented in devices. The purpose of this study is to analyse the results, and their accuracy, deriving from a survey conducted with the KAARTA Stencil 2 handheld system. This instrument, composed of a 3D LiDAR Velodyne VLP-16, a MEMS inertial platform and a feature tracker camera, it is able to realize the temporal 3D map of the environment. Specifically, the acquisition tests were carried out in a context of metrical documentation of an architectural heritage, in order extract architectural detail for the future reconstruction of virtual and augmented reality environments and for Historical Building Information Modeling purposes. The achieved results were analysed and the discrepancies from some reference LiDAR data are computed for a final evaluation. The system was tested in the church and cloister of the Sanctuary of the Beata Vergine del Trompone in Moncrivello (VC) (Italy).