Local Natural Hazards, Cascading to Cross-Regional Risks and Impacts Along the Main Transit Route from North and South in the Austrian Alps

Global environmental changes are widely visible in mountainous areas. These changes can influence the susceptibility of critical infrastructure to well documented and novel natural hazards, cascading as well as compounding risks and potentially threaten cross-border mobility. Within the scope of the EU Horizon project PARATUS, the risk in multiple application case study sites is evaluated regarding past events and future scenarios. Here, we focus on the Brenner Corridor (Austria–Italy), one of the main transit routes through the Alps for both road and rail traffic. Compounding events could potentially lead to a complete blockage of the Brenner Corridor. This demonstrates the importance of a better understanding of regional conditions to develop adjusted adaptation strategies with regard to extreme events, such as extreme wind, floods, rockfall, forest fires, landslides, or snow avalanches. In order to investigate the variety of possible challenges, participatory workshops, scenario modelling and impact chains are developed. Both historical disaster events and future scenarios are analysed. Preliminary results show the great variety of hazards and potential impacts resulting from changing environmental conditions, and the complex interaction of multiple hazards in the Brenner Corridor. Generally, stakeholders are very conscious of these challenges, have well-established concepts in place to face single hazards. However, especially the handling of compounding events and cross-border interaction still has room for improvement. The implementation of impact chains and scenario modelling can help practitioners to find adaptation and mitigation strategies for compounding and cascading hazards. Further work includes scenario modelling on different spatial and temporal scales.