Climate cHangE Resistant DanUBe rIver eMbankments (CHERUBIM)
Due to climate change, rainfall is intensifying and flooding events are increasingly observed in Europe, where approximately one fifth of European cities with over 100,000 inhabitants is very vulnerable to river floods (European Environemental Agency, 2016). In South-East Europe, the Danube is one of the main natural links. Unfortunately, recurrent catastrophic floods revealed how vulnerable it is to extreme natural events (Figure 1). Recent floods, such as those in 2006 and 2010, mainly affected the lower reaches of the Danube in Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine and caused dozens of deaths and displaced 50,000 people (World Wide Fund, 2006). The repeated extreme flood events of the Danube in recent years have shown that the stability of many old dikes is at risk. In the case of inadequate sealing, faults in the structure or poor maintenance, the flow pressure in the event of flooding causes seepage currents in and underneath the embankments that may lead to the detachment of individual grains from the grain structure (suffosion) inside the dike body. In extreme cases, erosion rivulets (so-called piping) form, which eventually trigger an erosion base failure, causing the dike to collapse. The project “Climate cHangE Resistant DanUBe rIver eMbankments” (CHERUBIM) brings together a multidisciplinary team of major countries along the Danube to address the grand challenge of embankment stability under the setting of the global climate change. Our team covers the diverse expertise for rational assessment of embankment stability, from constitutive and physical modelling through numerical analysis and slope stability to artificial intelligence, to boost the resilience of current infrastructure under changing climates. The goals of this project are to: i) develop new insights, approaches and technologies that support the needs of engineering practitioners and decision makers to make the Danube river embankments more resilient to the increasing threat of natural hazards due to the effect of climate change; ii) strengthen the transnational cooperation among Central European institutions to form a strong academic network to foster technological developments in this field.