Territorial Digital Twins: A key for Increasing the Community Resilience of Fragile Mountain Inner Territories?

Areas suffering territorial imbalances are at risk, as climate change and inherentsocial-spatial vulnerabilities bring uncertainty over their capacity to achieve sustainabledevelopment. To enable policy-makers' vision for them, the paper proposes adoptingdigitally-enhanced disaster risk reduction practices which promote civic engagementand evidence-based decision-making. The study introduces the concept of TerritorialDigital Twins (TDTs) demonstrating the potential benefits of networking distributedinformation resources and enabling their integration in two paradigmatic Italian innermountain areas, which are linked to different priorities of the Sendai Framework forDisaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (SFDRR). This contribution argues the impor-tance of complementing the technical approach with the social perspective in thedevelopment of TDTs oriented at increasing the community resilience of territori-ally imbalanced areas. It then illustrates the usefulness of exploiting TDTs (fromphotogrammetry, GIS mapping, Space Syntax analysis) to overcome the barriers tothe SFDRR, and enable its effective implementation in localities.