Suchergebnisse

The topic of the high seismic vulnerability of housing stock in Italy is back again at the center of political, economic, social and scientific-technical debate following the seismic crisis that struck Marche, Umbria and Lazio regions in 2016. These events have once again raised the need for a massive retrofitting program at National and Regional level, addressing the majority of the existing building stock, realized for 60% prior to the adoption of the first seismic code (Law 64/74), in a territory characterized north to south by high levels of seismic hazard. In recent years, different kinds of tools have been implemented to allow the simulation of natural hazards' impacts on the built environment and to support strategic choices both in the field of emergency management and resilience-based urban design and planning. Nevertheless, an integrated set of instruments for a quantitatively informed decision support is still missing.Within EU-FP7 CRISMA project, an integrated DSS (Decision Support System) application has been developed, with a set of tools and functionalities addressing the main aspects involved in the decision-making processes for natural hazards preparedness and response.

Climate Services are emerging worldwide as an essential tool to bridge the advancement in climate science and meteo/earth observations with a variety of operational fields in the domains of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA). The modelling methodology developed within CLARITY project (EU-Horizon 2020, www.clarity-h2020.eu) is aimed at implementing a new generation of climate services specifically designed to address adaptation measures at city level, thus dealing with planning and urban design issues in the context of new construction and retrofitting of buildings, open spaces and green and blue infrastructure. The general logic follows the six-steps approach outlined in the EU document "Non-paper Guidelines for Project Managers: Making vulnerable investments climate resilient", modified and integrated according to the updated risk assessment methodology and terminology as proposed within IPCC-AR5 framework, which reconnects the climate change domain with the conventional DRR modelling approach (R=HxExV). The approach intends to support the assessment and appraisal of adaptation measures within foreseen planning and urban design activity, by providing a detailed impact quantification on selected elements at risk (e.g. population, buildings, transport infrastructure, local economy, etc.) under the effect of extreme weather events in context of climate change based on high resolution climate projections. In this sense, a major effort is devoted to embedding urban microclimate projections as additional refining step in the conventional GCM-RCM downscaling approach and performing climate sensitivity simulations of adaptation measures on the urban scale. Vulnerability and impact assessment represent an essential component of the proposed simulation-based scenario assessment methodology, aimed at increasing the potential for use of scientific results by decision-makers to streamline national to local DRR and CCA policies. The envisaged climate services tool combines multi-hazard and ...

This paper proposes a review of existing strategies and tools aiming at facilitating the operationalization of the concept of resilience into built environments. In a context of climate change, increased risks in urban areas and growing uncertainties, urban managers are forced to innovate in order to design appropriate risk management strategies. Among these strategies, making cities resilient has become an imperative. This injunction to innovation fits perfectly with the urban, economic, political, social and ecological complexity of the contemporary world. As a result, the concept of resilience is integrated into the issues of urban sprawl and the associated risks. However, despite this theoretical and conceptual adequacy, resilience remains complex to integrate into the practices of urban planners and territorial actors. Its multitude of definitions and approaches has contributed to its abstraction and lack of operationalization. This review highlights the multitude of approaches and methodologies to address the bias of the lack of integration of the concept of resilience in risk management. The limit is the multiplication of these strategies which lead to conceptual vagueness and a lack of tangible application at the level of local actors. The challenge would then be to design a toolbox to concentrate the various existing tools, conceptual models and decision support systems in order to facilitate the autonomy and responsibility of local stakeholders in integrating the concept of resilience into risk management strategies.

The ESPREssO Project set out to propose ways to inform more coherent national and European approaches on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA). A critical step in this process is the identification of existing barriers to effective collaboration, finding new areas of common ground, and ways to enhance co-operation with regards to CCA and DRR policymaking in Europe. This is particularly important considering the potential relationships between CCA and DRR activities at the regional, national, European and global levels. Serious games have emerged as a valuable tool to communicate information and catalyse discussion in many policy arenas. The games have the power to inform, mainly by exposing strengths and weaknesses of a system but not necessarily create policy choices. This paper presents the development process and rationale behind creation of RAMSETE I, a serious game developed by and for the ESPREssO Project to elicit information from its stakeholders in aiming to inform synergies between CCA and DRR sectors. The results assess its application as a device to frame discussions during an international Think Tank workshop. The serious game focused on three particular aspects of CCA and DRR policy interactions: (1) separation of administrative responsibilities and the use of different terminology, (2) the ongoing competition for funding and political will as well as (3) difficulties regarding the top-down implementation of policies. The rules and design process are presented briefly, before going in-depth into the information gleaned during its application in the workshop. ; ISSN:2212-4209

Natural hazards and climate-related disasters disregard political borders, where additional barriers can complicate mitigation, response and recovery efforts within and between the sectors of Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). The ESPREssO Project (Enhancing Synergies for Disaster Prevention in the European Union) aims to improve management of transboundary disasters by encouraging closer synergies between the CCA and DRR communities. Using targeted stakeholder interviews, questionnaires, Think Tank discussions and purpose-built serious games, ESPREssO draws on both CCA and DRR stakeholder experiences and informed perspectives in order to identify current gaps. Set within a fictitious border zone, ESPREssO's RAMSETE II serious game challenges CCA and DRR stakeholders in making coordinated decisions before, during and after a simulated disaster, in protection of population and critical infrastructure. Results highlight the essential role of local governance mechanisms as the sharp end of the policy wedge, with current examples of proactivity that require to be championed and supported at national level in order to thrive. These good practice examples reflect the fact that transboundary settings, despite their challenges, act as fertile ground for mutual growth, offering opportunities for CCA and DRR communities to find innovative ways to cooperate and unite in developing synergies and strengthening their mutual efforts towards resilience. Stakeholders emphasise a need to invest more resources in informal cooperation and call on policy makers to recognise that each border zone raises its own unique set of complex challenges that requires flexibility and special consideration by transboundary authorities in management of disasters. ; ISSN:2212-4209

In recent years, the representation of climate information in a way to support decision making has been gaining momentum. Worldwide, these so-called climate services are emerging as an essential tool to connect the advances in climate science with the domains of climate change adaptation. The methodology developed within the CLARITY project (funded through European Union funding program Horizon 2020) is aimed at implementing a new generation of climate services specifically designed to assess adaptation measures at the city level under the effects of extreme weather events in the context of climate change. These effects are assessed based on observations as well as climate projections, and the subsequent derivation of climate indices to address changes in climate extremes. The dynamical-statistical downscaling of regional climate model results is used to obtain this information on fine spatial scales (100 m), hence providing urban scale projections and enabling climate sensitivity simulations of adaptation measures on the urban scale. The climate adaptation strategies encompass, among others, green roofs, increasing roof albedo, as well as changes in soil sealing. Here, the climate assessment methodology developed within CLARITY will be discussed in detail, and results for the city of Linz (Austria) presented. In addition, the usage of these methods and results within the CLARITY climate service as well as the connection to urban climate change resilience will be highlighted.