WP leader: TUDO (Stefan Greiving) and CNR (Simone Sterlacchini)

The aim of this Work Package is to utilize the risk scenarios resulting from WP3 and analyze the optimal instruments and tools for risk management, covering the whole disaster cycle and considering the complexity of changing environments, risk management has to deal with. The risk management tools that will be evaluated focus on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), land use planning, cost-benefit analysis for the construction of mitigation measures, early warning and emergency preparedness. Risk information can be integrated into EIA of future projects and SEA for spatial planning in different sectors (e.g. housing, infrastructure, agriculture, nature conservation; -Greiving, 2004-). Land use planning tools are utilized to compare different scenarios of development planning and weight the variations in the impact of hydro-meteorological hazards. Spatial Multi-Criteria Evaluation is an important tool in the combination of a heterogeneous set of many different factors and constraints for spatial planning. Hazard and risk information is also used as a basis for regulatory zoning plans at local and (depending from the existing instruments) also at regional level. What is still not fully understood is the influence of the different legal/administrative systems on the quality of risk management and transferability of best practices from one country to another. Moreover, long-term changes on patterns of land-use triggered by climatic triggers have to be taken into account, together with socio-economic and demographic changes. This means that some attention has to be paid to integrative planning approaches dealing with the complexity of a changing environment. Special emphasis in this Work Package is also given to the use of risk information in the design of early warning systems, and in emergency response planning. In all the risk management options, the changes in risk that are evaluated in the previous Work Packages will form the basis for evaluating the required changes in risk management approaches. These approaches will be integrated into a Web-based platform for risk management, as an add-on to the platform for probabilistic risk assessment, which is developed in WP3. The platform will be tested in the four pilot study areas. For the development of the web-based DSS, the results of WP5 will be taken into account.

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