Common practices to reduce the risk of watercourse management

Due to the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, especially in the actual climate change scenario, accurate and effective planning of torrent control works has become an essential tool to prevent geo-hydrological risk. This type of risk knows no administrative boundaries so the adoption of common strategies to improve watershed management and protect infrastructure, assets and lives becomes essential in vulnerable territories such as Italy and Slovenia. Moreover, modern intervention planning requires working at the basin scale even in cross-boundary contexts. Therefore, cooperation between public authorities, sectoral agencies, and research organisations is the only way to share different perspectives and knowledge enabling the development of joint solutions based on a broader vision of common challenges. The TORRENT project aims precisely at establishing shared and transnational guidelines to monitor the status and functionality of torrent control works and evaluate the long-term effectiveness of structures, prioritizing the maintenance intervention and improving the watershed management strategies.

Project will establish shared and transnational guidelines to monitor the status and functionality of torrent control works. Evaluate the long-term effectiveness of structures. Prioritizing the maintenance intervention and improving the watershed management strategies. A joint paper published in a peer-reviewed journal is planned.

TORRENT project intends to establish common guidelines for the planning and maintenance of torrent control works providing simple, quick, and user-friendly tools (e.g., Maintenance Priority index, updating and shared structures database, multi-temporal DEMs) for stakeholders. The TORRENT project will start by collecting and sharing historical data related to geo-hydrological processes, HRT surveys, torrent control works information and mitigation strategies, allowing the development of an innovative joint methodology. Then the project will work on pilot watersheds to demonstrate the applicability of the joint methodology and provide common intervention guidelines to address management issues of different watersheds in Italy and Slovenia.