The text on risk prevention had already passed the Senate before 30 October. Experts are calling for one final push to ensure all efforts are not wasted.
On 26 October, four days before the magnitude 6.5 earthquake — the most violent Italy has seen since 1980 — that destroyed Norcia and its surroundings, the Senate had unanimously approved a bill to support training and research in the geological sciences. A rare example of perfect timing in Italian politics, yet one that has had no follow-through since 30 October: for the law to be finalised it must still be passed by the Chamber of Deputies, and with the budget law on the way and a pause in parliamentary business for the referendum, there is a risk that the matter will be deferred directly to 2017.
The president of the Consiglio nazionale dei geologi, Francesco Peduto, and the president of the Società geologica italiana, Elisabetta Erba, are therefore appealing to institutions, because while "all political forces in the Senate have expressed a strong awareness of the need for research and training in the geological sciences as an essential element for the understanding and safeguarding of our territory, which is so exposed to natural risks," on the other hand "any further delay in the approval of the bill in the Chamber of Deputies risks undermining all the good work done so far."
According to the geologists, the swift final approval of the law would be significant because it would come "during a period that is putting the populations and the historical and cultural heritage of one of the most beautiful and precious areas of our country to an extremely harsh test, and which has once again brought the fragility of the Italian territory and its high exposure to geological risks back to the centre of general attention." The bill aims to allocate a total of 6 million euros to university courses, research into the forecasting and prevention of geological risk, and the establishment of new earth sciences departments, addressing a serious weakness in Italian universities, where a freeze on staff turnover and numerical constraints have led to a marked reduction in the number of earth sciences departments and their merger with other disciplines.
