Abstract
Mountain regions are disproportionately affected by climate and environmental changes and exposed to multiple and interconnected risks stemming from the combination of climatic and non-climatic stressors.
Mountain face complex and systemic risks, where cascading effects and interdependencies between ecological, social, and infrastructural components amplify vulnerability and impact. These unique challenges pose an urgent need for innovative yet structured methodologies and analytical processes capable to disentangle the complex cascade relations among risk components, as well as the interactions between risk components and external risk drivers to provide actionable strategies for risk reduction and resilience building.
With this contribution we aim to show the merits of Impact Chains (IC) as a structure and intuitive methodology to assess climate-related risks and support resilience planning in mountain regions. ICs provides a standardized analysis of multi-risk and multi-hazards events, eliciting and representing the cascade effects among risk components and identifying the interplay among hazard, compound vulnerabilities, and exposure factors, streamlining the chain of cascading impacts characterizing compound events.This approach allows for clearly identifying critical vulnerabilities as entry point for adaptation options toward future risk, enhancing the comprehension of risk dynamics toward more resilience mountain socio-ecological systems.
This contribution presents the theoretical foundation of the methodology and its practical application in examining risk dynamics and impact in the South-Eastern Alps connected to Vaia windstorm. he study is conducted within the scope of the Horizon Europe PARATUS project, which aims to improve disaster preparedness and risk management for dynamic and multi-hazard scenarios.
The analysis traces direct and indirect impacts across ecological and social systems, revealing both structural weaknesses and opportunities for adaptation. Further than being effective in identifying systemic vulnerabilities and the chain of direct and indirect impacts, the methodology has proved its functionality in identifying knowledge gaps as well as needs for improvement in data collection to enhance disaster risk management and ultimately design effective and long term resilience strategies to tackle multiple challenges connected to natural hazards intensification.