The Human-Tech Nexus - Building a Safe Haven to cope with Climate Extremes

The HuT will employ innovative disaster risk reduction solutions, accounting for the potential variations induced by climate change. This will involve integrating and leveraging best practices and successful multi-disciplinary experiences that have been recently developed within various territorial contexts by leading European research groups, institutions, and stakeholders, to deal with extreme climate events. The project’s main ambition beyond the state of the art is to promote the “best set” of trans-disciplinary risk management tools and approaches that could be adopted and used extensively across Europe, in as many situations as possible. The activities of the project will be developed considering the following main critical dimensions: trans-disciplinarity, systemic risk, co-production, cross-fertilization, transferability, and long-term legacy.

A set of ten demonstrators will constitute a multi-hazard arena wherein possible disastrous events associated with climate extremes will be dealt with jointly by representatives of the scientific and technical communities, practitioners, policy-makers and local communities. The events associated to climate extremes that will be considered in this project are: forest fires, including wildland urban interface fires; meteorological/hydrological/agricultural droughts, including associated water shortage; heatwaves; weather-induced landslides, including debris flows; fluvial and pluvial floods; storms, including heavy rain, hail, thunderstorms, and storm surges. The HuT will mainly focus on the prevention and preparedness phases of the disaster risk management cycle, explicitly considering climate change scenarios and integrating the proposed set of solutions, for the various events considered, over short- (from days to several months) and long-term (from years to decades) time horizons.