Part of the PITEM RISK plan, funded by the Interreg ALCOTRA program, the RISK-GEST project is dedicated to strengthening risk management. Started in the October 2018 and ending in 2021, the project is led by CIMA Research Foundation and intends to work on risk prevention, preparation and protection chain, making risk management integrated and uniform among institutions and shared with the population. In addition, the innovative approach of RISK-GEST aims to make dialogue and coordinate the different figures involved in risk management, as well as to involve citizens with a participatory planning approach. This strategy aims to make results a collective heritage and thus establish the basis for a real resilience of the ALCOTRA territory.
The project has three specific objectives: the improvement of territorial and risk management capacity, also through the involvement of the population; the improvement of risk monitoring and forecasting capabilities (particularly with regard to floods, landslides and avalanches) and, finally, the improvement of the operational capacity of crises. To achieve these objectives, multilevel governance policies will be developed on the one hand and, on the other, advanced methods for risk monitoring and management. More in detail, RISK-GEST aims to develop, with the involvement of population, local plans for flood and mountain-related risk management. It also wants to create or strengthen tools to support risk forecasting and monitoring.
In this perspective, the meteorological and hydrological observation networks of the Liguria Region and PACA Region will be improved in order to increase the frequency of updates, and numerical forecasting models with data assimilation (from satellite and ground sources) will be used for the prediction of extreme events. Moreover, a shared and coherent approach will be defined for a general risk assessment of landslide phenomena in the cross-border territory, encouraging the development of integrated and uniform policies among the competent institutions at cross-border level. Finally, among the expected results of RISK-GEST there is the creation of a geoportal able to collect geographical information, already present in the archives or collected with the applications developed by the project, which represents a support tool both in the emergency phases and in the planning phases of prevention policies.