Sustainable selective mitigation interventions towards effective earthquake risk reduction at the community scale

Risk reduction policies are crucial in regions of high seismic risk, having significant exposure and building vulnerability. In Italy, the Sismabonus incentive mechanism was recently approved, which regulates the possibility of benefiting tax deductions after seismic strengthening interventions on buildings. This paper presents a simplified approach for evaluating the effects of implementation of the Sismabonus policy at the territorial scale. Considering only reinforced concrete RC building typologies, a speed method for calculating the probability of being in relevant risk classes is introduced and it is applied to a town in southern Italy. The evaluation is based on simplified modeling of lateral seismic behavior and on the estimate of the peak ground acceleration corresponding to the attainment of building capacity. The effect of possible retrofit interventions is also considered. This performance-based procedure allows for taking into account the cost for selective retrofit interventions and contemporarily to estimate the variation of mean expected annual loss that is obtained with building upgrading.