Hazards and risks of climate change impacts in highly vulnerable areas: some examples in the high-mountain regions and in the urban areas.

Date
Speaker
Roberta Paranunzio

Abstract:Globally, climate change has wide ranging effects on all aspects of society, environment, and economy; however, the type and extent of these impacts are still widely debated. In this seminar I will show you some of the activities I have been involved in during the last years, regarding hazards and risks of climate change impacts in some key research hotspot areas. 

The first part of the seminar will be focused on high-elevation sites. These areas are particularly suitable for impact studies because of the presence of the cryosphere, which is highly sensitive to climate. Specifically, the effects on slope stability are receiving a growing attention in the recent years, both as terrestrial indicators of climate change and implications for hazard assessment. A statistical-based approach to detect climate anomalies associated with the occurrence of slope failures, with the aim to catch an eventual climate signal in the preparation and/or triggering of the considered events, will be presented. The method has been performed on more than 350 landslides occurred in the Italian Alps along 2000-2016 and highlighted that slope failures occurred in association with one or more climate anomalies in more than 90% of considered case studies. 

In the second part of the seminar, I will investigate the risks that climate change poses for other opposite, but nevertheless key environments, which are particularly sensitive to climate change impacts i.e., urban areas. They represent only a small fraction of the Earth’s surface, but they are where more than half of the global population resides and concentrations of assets and economic activities are found. Here, some insights from the EPA-funded Urb-ADAPT project in the Greater Dublin Region (Ireland) will be introduced. Current and potential future climate-related risks and vulnerabilities have been assessed by merging high-resolution climate data (current and projected) with information on land cover, population and socioeconomics. Specifically, results regarding heat risk assessment will be shown and their usefulness to support the implementation of targeted adaptation and mitigation strategies will be delineated.

Short Bio:Roberta Paranunzio received her M.S. Degree in Environmental Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino in 2013 and she obtained her Ph.D from the same institution in 2017. From 2013 to 2017, she was at CNR-IRPI and Politecnico di Torino working on the impacts of climate change on slope instability at high elevation sites and the estimation of climatic forcing on regional and global scale and with high spatial resolution, with a focus on the relation between air temperature variations in recent years and urbanization trend. Between 2018 and 2019, she was at the University College of Cork (Ireland) as Post-Doctoral Research Associate working on current and future climate-related risks to the population living in urban areas. She has been Researcher at CNR-ISAC (Torino) since 2020. Her main research stream focuses on the nexus between climate change, related-extreme events and natural hazards based on a multi-perspective approach in “hotspot” areas like high-mountain regions and urban areas. Specifically, main goals are: to develop predictive models for natural hazard occurrence, to assess exposure, vulnerabilities and risks related to identified hazards and to understand how physical and socio-economic systems respond to climate-induced natural hazards to support climate adaptation strategies.
 

watch video: https://youtu.be/VoKk6dsZdsA

Venue
Vitual (Go To Meeting: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/932307501)