Identification of infrastructures prone to natural hazards with open source databases

The number of natural disasters and the economic damage have dramatically increased in the last three decades. The reason can be ascribed to the increase in number and intensity of events due to climate change and continuous urbanization in areas often exposed to natural hazards. Roads and railways are important infrastructures ensuring social and commercial exchanges within and among nations. In our changing environment, infrastructures are more often exposed to different types of natural hazard, such as: floods, landslides, heatwaves, earthquakes and wildfires. The impacts generated may encompass accidents, damages to infrastructure assets, delays and malfunctioning of the transportation network, resulting in economic and social consequences. Climate changes can lead to an escalation of such negative impacts of natural hazards if no counter-measures are taken.

The first step in risk reduction of natural and weather-related adverse events is to identify the infrastructures exposed and the different natural hazards threatening them. A review of the available natural hazards databases at European scale has been carried out. An increased number of universities, governmental and research institutions have focused their attention, in the last decade, on natural hazards analysis and mapping. Numerous EU projects have also been founded on this topic and, several databases dealing with different natural hazards have been produced, so far. A review analysis of all open source databases available through internet has been carried out at a European level. The review gathered maps that allow the visualization of weather parameters and natural hazards in a GIS environment. The main natural hazards investigated were: floods, landslides, earthquakes, wildfires and heatwaves. Moreover, a specific focus has been payed to the following demonstration sites in the SAFEWAY project: Andalucia and Murcia regions in Spain; and Santarem, Leiria, Coimbra regions in Portugal. For each of them, the most critical hazards have been considered: floods and wildfires in Portugal; and floods, wildfires and heatwaves in Spain. For these location and hazard types, the availability of national and regional databases was investigated. If those databases were not available, the one at European scale was considered for the analyses. The most exposed parts of the transportation system were mapped by overlapping hazard maps with the railway and road tracks in a GIS environment. The information on the different infrastructures (railways and primary, secondary and tertiary roads) are provided by Open Street Map for each nation. The overlapping highlights the infrastructures "hot-spots" for different natural hazards.

The research leading to these and future results receives funding from the European Community’s H2020 Programme MG-7-1-2017 Resilience to extreme (natural and man-made) events, under Grant Agreement number: 769255 - "GIS-based infrastructure management system for optimized response to extreme events of terrestrial transport networks (SAFEWAY, https://www.safeway-project.eu/en)".