Identifying key challenges and geomorphological hazards along the Brenner corridor (central Alps), the main transit route between north and south Europe

Abstract

Global environmental changes are widely visible, this is especially true for mountainous areas. Temperatures in the alps have warmed almost twice as fast compared to the global average. These changes can influence the susceptibility of critical infrastructure regarding known and unknown natural hazards, cascading as well as compounding risks and e.g. potentially threaten cross-border transportation.

Within the scope of the EU Horizon project PARATUS (Promoting disaster preparedness and resilience by co-developing stakeholder support tools for managing the systemic risk of compounding disasters), multiple case study sites are evaluated regarding their susceptibility of past events and future scenarios. PARATUS aims to provide stakeholders, such as first and second responders with tools to tackle the increasing challenges of compounding and multi hazards, by co-developing an open-source platform for dynamic risk assessment. In this contribution, we focus on the Brenner Corridor (Kufstein, Austria – Bolzano, Italy), one of the main transit routes through the Alps, for both road and rail traffic. Compounding events can potentially lead to a complete blockage of the Brenner Corridor. Changing climate conditions alter the local and regional susceptibility towards certain risks. This demonstrates the importance of a better understanding of regional conditions to develop adjusted adaptation strategies.

In order to investigate the variety of possible challenges, participatory workshops, scenario modelling and impact chains are developed. Both, historical disaster events and future scenarios are analysed. The knowledge about past events is vital to gain insights into the mitigation of compounding and cascading natural as well as systemic hazards.

Preliminary results after the first stakeholder workshop show the great variety of hazards (e.g. forest fires) emerging from changing environmental conditions in forest areas, heavy precipitation events, high traffic volume and the complex interaction of multiple hazards in the Brenner Corridor. Generally, stakeholders are well aware of these challenges, have concepts to face single hazards, but especially compounding events and border interaction can be improved.

Including local knowledge and expertise can boost and stimulate scientific progress which helps to focus on problems not met or discussed in the current scientific discourse. The implementation of impact chains and scenario modelling can help practitioners to find adaptation and mitigation strategies for compounding and cascading hazards. Further work will include specified forward scenario modelling on different spatial and temporal scales.