Periodic Reporting for period 3 - OPERANDUM (OPEn-air laboRAtories for Nature baseD solUtions to Manage hydro-meteo risks)
Période du rapport: 2021-07-01 au 2022-12-31
The objective of OPERANDUM is to reduce hydro-meteorological risks in European territories through co-designed, co-developed, deployed, tested and demonstrated innovative green and blue/grey/hybrid NBS, and push business exploitation. It is providing science-evidence for the usability of NBS, best practices for their design based on participatory process, by means of a multiple level of stakeholders engagement from the local community up to the international level to leverage widest possible NBS acceptance to promote its diffusion as a good practice. It establishes the framework for the strengthening of NBS-based policies according to local legislation and promotes technology and innovation in NBS to create a European leadership.
OPERANDUM is based on open-air laboratories (OALs), a fairly new concept that expands the Living Labs to a wider vision for natural and rural areas. In OALs novel NBS in seven European countries and three in China and Australia are implemented to address specific risks and their effectiveness, assessed through innovative monitoring systems and cutting-edge numerical modelling approaches. OPERANDUM realizes a multi-dimensional open and flexible platform enabling stakeholders and end users to improve knowledge in NBS to mitigate climate change as well as ways to promote and exploit the improved/preserved environment while increasing business opportunities.
A complex monitoring system has been put in place in 8 countries where the NBS are being implemented. Also, multi-scale modelling has been implemented to evaluate the efficacy of the NBS also in comparison with monitored data to ensure a scientific-sound methodology for replication and upscaling. Both monitoring and modelling work is integrated in a complex structure where NBS is evaluated against co-benefits in the area of risk reduction, acceptance, business uptake. The scenarios associated to the specific meteorological conditions investigated have been evaluated through a set of indicators covering different areas of socio-economic, health, legislation and cultural dimensions.
Moreover, OPERANDUM Partners realized the original design, implementation and maintenance of a multi-dimensional, open and flexible platform, namely the OPERANDUM Geospatial Information Knowledge Platform (GeoIKP), available at http://geoikp.operandum-project.eu.
The project made crucial methodological advancements in multi-scale impact modelling (Gallotti et al. 2021, Kumar et al. 2020). Among other achievements, the methodological advancements fostered original assessments of NBS efficacy that account for a non-stationary climate consistently in all steps of the model chain (an example is provided by the work of Spyrou et al. 2021) and that may serve as proof-of-concept to generalise the approach.
The GeoIKP, as a major outcome of the project, was introduced in an abstract to the Global Assessment Report for Disaster Risk Reduction 2022, sharing several OPERANDUM results with a broad audience. OPERANDUM was presented as one of UNESCO’s NBS flagship projects during several virtual international events, including: the International Day for Disaster Reduction (Oct 13, 2020), the Global Mountain Sustainability Forum on October 5th, 2020, Thematic session on “Sustainable governance in mountain regions “, the 6th session of UNESCOs “Let’s talk DRR” series on Nature Based Solutions for Disaster Risk Reduction on December 18th, 2020 , the International Symposium on IoT and ML for Ecosystem Restoration and Multi-Hazard Resilience on June 5th, 2021. Knowledge transfer of OAL works is achieved through a series of public webinars organized by UNESCO.