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The challenge to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, and resilient, including mitigation and adaptation strategies against disaster, is a central issue in achieving sustainability. This research proposes a tool to measure local vulnerability from a multi-risk approach. The municipality of Moncalieri, Italy, was used as a case study within the research activities of the Responsible Risk Resilience Centre from the Polytechnic of Turin to test the vulnerability matrix. The tool consists of a mathematical framework for the territorial vulnerability assessment that integrates multiple indicators clustered into three factors defined as sensitivity, pressures, and hazards, weighted according to a participatory procedure. Space-dependent analyses using the Geographical Information System were developed from the multiple nested indicators to project the vulnerability index onto a homogeneous grid in the territory of interest. Thematic maps referring to the systemic vulnerability by different sensitivity components were generated. The tool not only contributes to increasing the awareness of territorial vulnerability but also offers support to resilience-based decision-making in designing technical measures of policies at a local scale. Further research is required to implement the framework in different scenarios and develop the model's temporal behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the night between the 19 and 20 September 2003, a loud explosion occurred at about 3km from the town of Carignano that was clearly heard at a distance of some tens of kilometres. The explosion almost completely destroyed most of the laboratories of the Panzera Company that were used for the production of fireworks. The results of the research activities that were carried out using a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) on the same raw materials that made up the pyrotechnical mixture that exploded are reported in this paper. This activity was carried out to identify the dynamics of the accident. It proved possible to verify how the event was produced because of a slow exothermic reaction which, after about 8h, caused the self-triggering of 120kg of finished product. The detonation can therefore be put down to a runaway reaction in the solid phase, whose primogenial causes can be attributed to a still craftsman type production system, not conformed to the rigorous controls and inspections as those required by a safety management system for major risk plants, as the Panzera Company was. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]