Climate change impacts on natural hazards risk management and Civil Protection of wildfires, floods, storms, avalanches, rockfalls and landslides. Reinforcing civil protection capabilities into multi-hazard risk assessment under climate change
The sixth IPCC report (2021) states that extreme weather events are more frequent and intense than in 1950 in most terrestrial regions. This trend is affecting Europe, where, in some areas, the increase in temperatures is expected to be higher than in other regions. In recent years, Europe has experienced various extreme events such as the flash
floods in Germany and Italy (2021), or the wildfires in Portugal (2017), Scandinavia (2018), Greece (2020) and Turkey (2021). Climate change is modifying natural hazard situations as they are known, increasing their intensity,
frequency, and distribution (IPCC, 2021). In parallel, there is a high level of uncertainty about the specific impacts of climate change in each particular natural hazard. Consequently, risk management must deal with new and often unprecedented or very rare situations, making Disaster Risk Reduction strategies (DRR) and decision-making processes more complex, and consequently stressing the risk management system. The Civil Protection system has a crucial role in
coping with natural hazards through different actions and measures throughout the different stages of the risk cycle. This ranges from prevention (e.g., pre-designing and developing confinement and evacuation infrastructures and promoting
risk awareness), to preparedness (e.g., updating protocols and putting in practice drills to new risk scenarios) and response/recovery (e.g., with efficient communication to the exposed population, and restoring critical infrastructures and services in the affected areas). Hence, a proper link between the mitigation measures within the risk cycle under integrated approaches helps to manage the emergency more efficiently. The proper inclusion of emergencyresponse
requirements into risk assessment and planning should contribute to reinforcing DRR strategies, decreasing the impacts of natural hazards on citizens, infrastructures and livelihoods. Based on the above, the project Reinforcing civil
protection capabilities into multi-hazard risk assessment under climate change (RECIPE) provides some reflections and tools to reinforce civil protection in emergency management and risk planning for different natural hazards (wildfires, floods, storms, avalanches, landslides and rockfalls) across Europe in a climate change context. This publication
summarizes the main results achieved during the project, which is addressed to operators involved in
forest risks management and Civil Protection.
