Baronnies Provençales Regional Nature Park Pilot Action Region The Benefit of Large-Scale Rockfall Modelling for Developing Efficient Forest-Based Integrative Management of an Alpine Territory

The choice of a natural risk prevention strategy must be considered at the scale of a territory in order to take into account all its components. Since 2015, France has developed integrated natural risk management (INRM) approaches in Alpine territories. The challenge of INRM lies in the definition and implementation of innovative projects for initiating synergies with respect to natural risks while seeking to increase resilience through the new and different involvement of the territorial actors. The Baronnies Provençales Regional Nature Park is one of the pilot territories for the operational implementation of this approach, with a particular focus on forest-based solutions. For this reason it has been chosen as the French Pilot Action Region (PAR) of the Interreg Alpine Space project GreenRisk4Alps. In this article we present an example of good practice related to the benefit of large-scale rockfall risk modeling, the analysis of potential cascading effects and the added value of a territorial perspective.

Oberammergau Pilot Action Region Mountain Forest Initiative (BWO)

Natural hazards caused by climate change pose a permanent threat to the inhabitants of the Alpine Space. In addition to technical protection measures, forests are very often the key to permanent and cost-effective protection against these hazards. In the Mountain Forest initiative (BWO) of the Bavarian state government, launched more than 10 years ago, suitable measures for the preservation of protective forest are discussed and, if possible, decided by consensus in on-site round tables with all involved interest groups. Only a functioning interaction between the different actors in the Alpine Space will contribute towards the set objective of integrating forests and ecosystem services in risk governance and balancing the numerous interests, demands and costs. Using the example of the Oberammergau Pilot Action Region (PAR), the process and implementation of the BWO is presented against a background of more than 10 years of experience. At the beginning, the identification of stakeholders and the overall goal and expectations of the participatory process (technical issues, trust and community building) is clarified. After a detailed actor analysis, the moderated participatory process is described.

Dedans et contre le patrimoine

There are the Alps, the Alpine space, and there is heritage or heritages, depending on the meaning of the term and on the position adopted with regard to the questions raised by this notion. Heritage is not only something that exists and to which we are attached, but it should also be possible to produce it. It is this production that is addressed in these brief reflections on architectural works that attempt to combine heritage and “montagnité”. As soon as the mountain is built upon, the problem of form and, therefore, of its shaping arises. It is the latter that requires production, i.e. a way of thinking that is capable of thematising both the mountain and the heritage. But what are we talking about when we apply the heritage label to Alpine architecture? Is this what is commonly defined as edilizia rurale (rural housing)? Or is it the architectural work that interprets the edilizia rurale and, in a way, absorbs it? Assuming that the heritage regime in the mountains is part of the variation and not the fixity of a notion such as that of the monument, and that the notion of heritage informs and conforms every architectural project in the mountains, it is possible to put forward a second hypothesis and to affirm that both the edilizia rurale and the architectural projects that transform it, operating within and against it, are heritage. For the latter, however, the rules that Adolf Loos wrote for those who build in the mountains remain valid.

Smart Altitude

This final report summarizes the outcomes of the Smart Altitude project. The Smart Altitude project ran from June 2018 to April 2021 and was carried out by ten partners from six different countries in the Alpine Space (Austria, France, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, and Switzerland). The project was co-financed by the European Union via Interreg Alpine Space. The aim of the project was to enable and accelerate the implementation of low-carbon policies in winter tourism regions by demonstrating the efficiency of a step-by-step decision support tool for energy transition in four Living Labs. The project targeted policymakers, ski resort operators, investors, tourism, and entrepreneurship organizations. The Smart Altitude approach was designed to ensure suitability across the Alpine Space, thereby fostering its replication and uptake in other winter tourism regions and thus increasing the resilience of mountain areas.

Delayed soil-moisture and hydrological drought impacts in mountain regions

<p>Droughts are among the most damaging natural hazards leading to a wide range of impacts also in the water-rich mountain regions. In recent years, drought conditions and impacts have been reported frequently in the European Alpine region, possibly because climate change affects mountain environments more rapidly than others. However, in mountain regions the propagation of drought signals through the hydrological cycle and into different environmental and societal impact occurrence are poorly understood, especially regarding the impacts’ seasonal patterns and delayed effects. This study aims to improve the understanding of the droughts’ characteristics and their impacts from the high elevation headwater regions down to plateau and foothill areas. Specific climate conditions in high elevation regions determine an alpine environment, economy and society that differs from the pre-Alpine regions. Subsequently, impacts are expected to vary as well and indices for drought monitoring may have to be selected specifically for such a region. The European Drought Impact Report Inventory (EDII) compiles text-reports on negative drought impacts across Europe and classifies them into 15 categories with 108 subtypes. An updated version focusing on the ‘Alpine Space’ released as EDII<sub>ALPS</sub> V1.0 contains more than 3,200 reports about drought impacts. The most relevant categories are Agriculture and livestock farming and Public water supply. This data allowed an analysis of the seasonal patterns of drought impacts in several categories for four sub-regions in the Alpine Space: pre-Alpine vs. high-elevated region, Northern vs. Southern region. Assigning the impacts subtypes to drought type, soil-moisture drought (SMD impacts) and hydrological drought (HD impacts) allowed the derivation of smoothed seasonal “impact regimes”. The peak of HD impacts occurred later in the year than the SMD impact peak, most clearly in the high-elevation region, with the latest increase of HD impacts in May and strongest decrease between November-December. This pattern is less clear for the Southern region. SMD indices and HD indices that may be used for monitoring and early warning need to be targeted to and tested for capturing these delays.</p>

Alpine drought impact chains for sector-based climate-risk assessments

<p>Droughts are slow and silent natural hazards that can lead to long-lasting environmental, societal and economic impacts. Mountain regions are also experiencing drought conditions with climate change affecting their environments more rapidly than other places and reducing water availability well beyond their geographical locations. These conditions call for better understanding of drought events in mountains with innovative methodologies able to capture their complex interplays.</p><p>Within this context, the Alpine Drought Observatory (ADO) Interreg Project aims to further improve the understanding of drought conditions in the Alpine Space, with activities spanning from the characterization of drought types’ components in five heterogeneous case studies in Austria, France, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland. For each case study, different sectors exposed to drought, ranging from hydropower, agriculture to tourism are considered. Moreover, specific socio-economic characteristics were collected for each sector in order to better understand the main drivers leading to drought impacts.</p><p>Starting from the risk concept in the IPCC AR5, the Impact Chains (IC) methodology has been applied to characterize the hazard, exposure and vulnerability components in the ADO case studies. IC allowed to pinpoint the main factors affecting drought risk and the relevant socio-economic sectors integrating a mixed-method approach. Quantitative data collection on the hazard and exposure components were coupled with local experts’ knowledge on the main vulnerability factors (e.g., through a questionnaire). Although validation represents a critical part of drought modelling, IC analysis and results were therefor compared with information from the European Drought Impact Inventory (EDII) on local drought impacts collected from scientific publications, unions press releases and newspaper articles over a long time period.</p><p>While drought risk assessment through IC can improve the understanding of the main drought events and their underlying factors, they also provide insights to improve planning and management of future drought events in the Alpine Space.</p>

An Alpine Drought Impact Inventory to explore past droughts in a mountain region

Drought affects even mountain regions, despite a humid climate. Droughts' damaging character in the past and an increasing probability in future projections call for an understanding of drought impacts in the European Alpine region. The European Drought Impact Report Inventory (EDII) collects text reports on negative drought impacts. This study presents a considerably updated EDII focusing on the study region of the greater Alpine Space. This first version release of an Alpine Drought Impact Inventory (EDIIALPS) classifies impact reports into categories covering various affected sectors and enables comparisons of the drought impact characteristics. We analyzed the distribution of reported impacts on the spatial, temporal and seasonal scale, and by drought type for soil-moisture and hydrological drought. For the spatial analysis, we compared the impact data located in the Alpine Space' to entire Europe. Further, we compared impact data between different climatic and altitudinal domains (Northern vs. Southern region, pre-Alpine vs. high-altitude region), and between the Alpine countries. Compared to entire Europe, in the Alpine Space agriculture and livestock farming impacts are even more frequently reported, especially in the Southern region. Public water supply is second most relevant sector, but overall less prominent compared to Europe, especially in spring when snowmelt mitigates water shortages. Impacts occurred mostly in summer and early autumn with a delay between those impacts initiated by soil-moisture and those by hydrological drought. The high-altitude region showed this effect the strongest. From 1975 to 2020, the number of archived reports increased, with substantially more impacts noted during the drought events of 1976, 2003, 2015 and 2018. Moreover, reported impacts diversified from agricultural dominance to multi-facetted impact types covering forestry, water quality, industry and so forth. Though EDIIALPS is biased by reporting behaviour, the amount of more than 3200 compiled reports on negative drought impacts demonstrates the need to move from emergency actions to better preparedness. These may be guided by EDIIALPS' insights to regional patterns, seasons and drought types.

Smart Villages Policies: Past, Present and Future

Highlighting the important role of rural development, this paper represents a review of rural policies. Data were generated, including a broad literature research and online survey on existing and future, post-2020 rural development policies. The survey was shared among project partners from six different EU Member States including eleven regions, all from the Alpine Space. The number of total policies covered in this review paper, together with policy projects, programs or actions, is 114. Based on these, key policy findings and future recommendations are provided, attributing to the future studies on this topic as well as for policymakers at the local, regional, national and EU levels.

Evaluation and Expected Changes of Summer Precipitation at Convection Permitting Scale with COSMO-CLM over Alpine Space

There is an ongoing debate in the climate community about the benefits of convection-permitting models that explicitly resolve convection and other thermodynamical processes. An increasing number of studies show improvements in Regional Climate Model (RCM) performances when the grid spacing is increased to 1-km scale. Up until now, such studies have revealed that convection-permitting models confer significant advantages in representing orographic regions, producing high-order statistics, predicting events with small temporal and spatial scales, and representing convective organization. The focus of this work is on the analysis of summer precipitation over the Alpine space. More specifically, the driving data are downscaled using the RCM COSMO-CLM first at an intermediate resolution (12 km) over the Euro-CORDEX domain. Then, a further downscaling at 3 km, nested into the previous one, is performed over the Alpine domain to exploit the results over a complex orography context. Experiments of evaluation, historical and far future under the IPCC RCP8.5 scenario have been considered. Indices as mean precipitation, frequency, intensity, and heavy precipitation are employed in daily and hourly analyses. The results, observed from the analysis of 10 year-long simulations, provide preliminary indications, highlighting significant differences of the convection permitting simulations with respect to the driving one, especially at an hourly time scale. Moreover, future projections suggest that the convection permitting simulation refines and enhances the projected patterns, compared with the coarser resolution.

Case della modernità alpina. Spazi inaugurali di apertura, sperimentazione, sedimentazione

"Why the need, in some way the urgency, of a historically retrospective number of «ArchAlp» magazine dedicated to the houses of Alpine modernity? The intent of this issue is to investigate the relationship between twentieth century modernity and contemporaneity in terms of breaks and novelties, of continuity and discontinuity, of shooting, variations and implementations, not just under the formal and linguistic aspect. In other words, are there points of interaction, long lasting red threads between the architectural vision of Lois Welzenbacher, Charlotte Perriand, Carlo Mollino, and that of Peter Zumthor, Gion A. Caminada, Bernardo Bader? It is basically a way to understand the existence of more or less long trajectories in the way architecture has set the critical and cultural field of mountain construction, recognizing differences and specificities. Although these are generally well-known projects, the works published in this issue of «ArchAlp» are not uniformly known in the territories that refer to the Alpine space. Hence the importance of gathering together a series of architectures that have had the potential for prototypes in order to submit them to a general and comparative view. Even in the absence of perhaps direct subsidiaries, the architectures presented in these pages represent an extraordinary patrimony of design moves and strategies which, through the internalization of experiences, deeply influenced the formation and determination of the contemporary architectural research field in the Alpine environment."