U-GEOHAZ - Geohazards impact assessment for urban areas

The U-Geohaz project is focused on monitoring geohazard-associated ground deformations, a key prevention action that will be specifically addressed to urban areas and critical infrastructures. The project will propose a procedure to produce maps to assess continuously the potential impact of geohazard activity. These maps will provide essential inputs to support early warning, giving information on the stability of the monitored areas andto evaluate the expected damage. The goal of the project will be achieved by fully exploiting the results obtained in SAFETY project (ECHO/SUB/2015/718679/PREV02).

In particular, U-Geohaz aims to advance with respect to SAFETY, evolving from periodically updated maps to an early mapping and monitoring of the geohazard activity. In particular, the project will provide tools to support early warning (EW) systems for landslides and rock-falls, and an EW system for volcanic geohazard. We will validate its applicability over two test sites located in Canary Islands (Spain) and Valle d’Aosta (Italy). In the first site will be tested both volcanic and rock-fall early-warning. In the second, the methodology will be applied for landslide geohazard.

The main output of the project will be the development of new products for multi-geohazard prevention purposes and the validation of its potentialities by implementing their use in the involved CPAs. All the products will be Inspire-compliant and developed following the recommendations of Sendai Framework for Disaster Reduction. The project will include also a review of the relation between the National Geological Surveys (GS) and the CPAs, with the aim of contributing to improve their cooperations. This task will be relevant in order to fill a gap detected in the project SAFETY, where the involved CPAs demonstrated a high interest in the developed products, but a low capacity to produce them. The aim is to exploit the technical capacities of the GS to fill this gap.