Abstract
Locals and tourists love spending time in nature and practicing mountain sports. This trend resulted in an increase in accidents related to mountain sports in recent years. This leads, among other things, to highly complex liability questions and it is, therefore, necessary to make nature as tangible as possible for the sake of the law. Criminal law in particular depends on precise parameters for assessing liability. On the one hand, protective measures seek to make the mountain environment safer to provide better protection for the inhabitants of Alpine areas from avalanches, landslides, and rockfalls through targeted disaster risk reduction measures. Sports enthusiasts, on the other hand, have the opportunity to experience mountain environments that constantly challenge human capacity to cope with the uncertainty embedded in the Alpine environment For these reasons, as part of an interregional and interdisciplinary project called M_Risk (Natural Hazards in the Mountain Environment: Risk Management and Responsibility), and starting from some assumptions from the legal world, we designed and administered two surveys to find out respectively if and how much tourists and members of local mountain sports associations behave in a self-responsible way while doing summer and winter sports. We chose as study area Trentino, South Tyrol in Italy, and Tyrol in Austria, based on the assumption that in Italy criminal law is dominated by a paternalistic attitude and consequently characterized by over-regulation, if compared with the Austrian approach. Our research design started from the concepts of residual risk, its perception, and the type of preparation when doing sport activities. Our results can give us useful information both on who the different sportsmen and women are and how they behave, and on which aspects of accident risk prevention future action should be focused. Although we didn’t address climate adaptation explicitly in our research design and in the questionnaires, the results are also valuable in the context of climate change adaptation.