Transboundary storm risk and impact assessment

How did the idea of the TRANS-ALP project come about?

Storm Vaia in 2018 was a wakeup call for both the scientific community and the practitioners and local authorities in the Alpine region. The storm impacted the previously less affected southern side of the Alps, downing more than 8 million cubic meters of forests and causing extensive damage due to heavy rain, flooding and landslides, with an economic loss exceeding EUR 3 billion. A similar extreme event occurred during a 1966 cyclonic storm. These two cases were considered exceptional, but could foreshadow a change in the frequency and intensity of large-scale disasters, partly as a result of climate change. In such conditions, currently available risk assessment and prevention tools can prove inadequate, particularly on a cross-border level and in vulnerable mountainous regions.

Could you tell us what the TRANS-ALP project is about?

The overall goal of TRANS-ALP was to provide innovative multi-hazard storm risk assessment and impact forecasting methodology, tailored for civil protection authorities in cross-border mountain regions. This involved critically scrutinising existing multi-hazard risk assessment approaches and mapping techniques of socio-economic assets and their vulnerability, better informing decision-making processes for disaster risk prevention in mountain areas of the European Union, and encouraging the adoption of common standards by comparing best practices across borders.

TRANS-ALP built a database of selected extreme events with damaging effects that occurred between 1980 and 2020 in the border area between Austria and Italy, to better understand such events and use them to inform more efficient impact forecasting methodologies.

We implemented a cross-border framework to model possible exposure to natural hazards. It covers the areas of South Tyrol (Italy), East Tyrol (Austria) and a part of Veneto (Italy), and accounts for issues like the changing number of people in given areas during daytime, at night, and during peak commuter times.

We also created a cross-border risk re-assessment framework to estimate the potential increase in avalanche hazard in the months following a wind-storm event. This framework, tested in two Alpine areas in Veneto (Italy) and East Tyrol (Austria), might be suitable for application in the whole Alpine area and in other mountainous regions in Europe. The project also developed cross-border risk-assessment reports for storm-related hazards, supported by common standardised methodologies and data sharing tools.

What’s next for TRANS-ALP?

The TRANS-ALP activities have helped research that will be continued in other projects. For example, the management of multi-hazard risks due to extreme meteorological events will be further explored by Eurac Research and Austria's national weather and geophysical service (Geosphere Austria) in the project ‘X-Risk CC’, which is financed under the INTERREG Alpine Space.

The Austrian Research Centre for Forests and other Austrian stakeholders will quantify cascading effects of storm-related forest damage on the snow avalanche hazard in a study site in East Tyrol (Austria).Finally, the regional Veneto Agency for Environmental Protection, in collaboration with the University of Padova, will further analyse the impact of wind on forests and their evolution.