Integrated Approach to Flood Risk Management (INARMA)

The management of water resources is becoming, at a time of scarcity and climatic change, more and more complex and is often subject to social tension among the various inhabitants of the same geographical area. When, on top of this, a terrain is affected by calamitous events (landslides, inundations, river outpourings, floods, debris flows, slope failures, etc.) the tensions involved and the harms caused by poor decisions (or worse: wrong decisions) can become a source of ungovernability constraining future choices in land organization. The management of hydrologic regimes and surface water outflows in small catchment basins, considered exclusively in terms of public works, has often led to complex, expensive and sometimes even dangerous interventions, and to practically ineffective and uselessly bureaucratic models of land administration and flood prevention.

The general objective of the project is to create a model for the management of critical hydrological events in minor river catchments of sub-regional importance, which are very numerous throughout the European Union. The basic thoughts expressed above suggest that two different problem categories will have to be faced in order to minimise residual hydraulic risk in secondary hydrographic networks:
- to define a hydrological and hydraulic forecasting model calibrated to local conditions;
- to make hydrological and hydraulic forecasting for small catchment basins manageable in real time, by adapting it to the actual event evolution on an hour-by-hour basis.

In order that the Provincial Civil Defence can take immediate, effective and safe action in case of calamity in small catchment basins, it is necessary to apply a series of preventive non-structural measures. A few examples are quoted below: - a detailed analysis of the terrain characteristics: definition of the secondary hydrographic network, analysis of the specific hydrological and hydrographic regime of the stream examined;
- non-formal simulation of the events likely to happen and of their possible evolutions;
- definition of risk scenarios with respect to: local inhabitants, businesses, communication routes, main infrastructures, cultural and environmental wealth;
- fine-tuning of intervention models based upon the actual resources and the co-ordination capacity of the population living in the area affected by calamities