Research

High alpine catchments are considered to be very sensitive to climatic and hydrological parameters and react strongly to changes due to the lack of buffering possibilities within the system. The aim of the project is the detection and quantification of climatic influences on the high alpine catchment and ecosystem of the Glatzbach, as well as its morphological and snow-hydrological process chains. A semi-automatic tool will be developed that can also be applied to other catchments in the Hohe Tauern region. The findings from the evaluations should make a significant contribution to the understanding of processes and the evaluation of high alpine catchments.

As climate change is expected to increase the wildfire hazard in central Europe, the need for wildfire risk assessment in Austria becomes imperative. A detailed risk assessment, however, requires a vulnerability analysis of the elements at risk. We present here a research proposal that focuses on the development of a vulnerability index for buildings subject to wildfire in Austria at the local level. The vulnerability index is an aggregation of vulnerability indicators that are related to building characteristics or characteristics of their surroundings. The index will be developed in close co-operation with local expert groups (co-creation) that will select the relevant indicators and weigh them during expert workshops. The advantages and functionality of the index will be demonstrated through applications in different case studies throughout Austria. These applications will address different aspects of disaster management (local adaptation, evacuation, damage documentation etc.) by combining the results with existing data (e.g., population). The case studies will be selected during the project based on the wildfire hazard of the area and the types of buildings, in an effort to include buildings with different uses (industrial, public, touristic, commercial, residential etc.) and the associated expert groups (local authorities, engineers, spatial planners, emergency services, tourism association, insurances companies etc.). The project considers the European standards for wildfire risk assessment of EFFIS/JRC and the developed wildfire risk assessment framework. It is also clearly in line with the “Aktionprogramm Brennpunkt Wald” of the BML by contributing to the further development of risk assessment and the harmonisation of data, by building alliances among experts and by creating knowledge and tools to support public awareness. The added value of the project, however, lies on the fact that it is object-oriented at the local level and that it offers opportunities for transdisciplinary exchange by involving multiple experts/stakeholders.

The project comprises the GIS-based analysis of the building stock of Austria, the merging of the building stock with the designated hazard zones of different intensity, the inclusion of information on water ecology, as well as the presentation of the possible precision and accuracies and model uncertainties. The first part of the study addresses the question of how and according to which criteria planning areas for water ecology and risk management (GE-RM) should be delimited.