Can extreme events be an opportunity? Depopulation and resilience of rural communities in Central Italy after the 1997 earthquake

Abstract Socio-Natural Disasters are a global issue that need context-specific solutions. Similar hazards could indeed result in different (or no) disasters depending on the territorial peculiarities of the area they affect. Italy is an interesting case in this respect due to its physical geography. Three out of the four major seismic events of the last decades hit the rural areas of the country, in particular Central Apennines – territories that have been suffering from decades-old processes of ageing and depopulation. Within the conceptual framework of Community Resilience, our paper performs a time-sensitive quantitative analysis designed to observe resilience dynamics along different degrees of rurality in the area hit by the 1997 earthquake in Central Italy. In details, we adopt a quasi-experimental strategy, using population variation as a proxy for community resilience. We find that the disaster had a stabilizing effect on the affected communities, which have depopulated at a slower pace than the control group after the event.