Guru-Chythanya GUPTHA, Ph.D. Candidate 40th cycle, University of Trento, DICAM

Urban water infrastructures are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the growing risks posed by natural hazards due to climate change. Events such as floods and droughts are expected to intensify, leading to severe urban flooding and water scarcity. In addition to recent studies focusing on the social and economic consequences of extreme events, it is equally important to pay attention to their impacts on water-related ecosystems. These impacts include the loss of biodiversity, the decline in ecosystem services, and land degradation—all of which emphasize the crucial need for sustainable water management in the face of climate change. Adhering to this background, the project will propose a novel framework to assess the impacts of both single and multiple hazards. It will focus on developing and applying innovative models across different spatial scales, including neighborhoods, streets, and urban landscapes, as well as temporal scales such as storm events, seasonal patterns, and annual trends. The project will provide a more accurate quantification of the frequency of compound extreme events, such as storms combined with floods or droughts combined with heat waves. At the same time, the modeling framework will include impact assessments of dynamic societal changes, such as shifts in population and economic assets. In addition, it will explicitly account for and quantify biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation.

The project aims to develop an innovative framework for multiple-risk assessment, which includes the probability of occurrence of compound hazards. The proposed framework will also be validated for various levels of climate change and urbanization in the study area, where data on natural hazard impacts (social and economic) are available. Furthermore, it will propose and test flexible and proactive strategies (i.e., adaptation and mitigation) to address the effects of climate change, particularly the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services.