Risk reduction measures. Supporting document for RRDB structure

Abstract

Potential effects of climate dynamics on the urban water cycle can involve the aggravation of existing conditions as well as occurrence of new hazards or risk factors. The risks associated with expected climate changes have to be dealt with by the society in general and by the water utilities and other stakeholders in particular. The challenges created by climate dynamics require an integrated approach for dealing with existing and expected levels of risk. Given the interactions of urban water and natural systems, adaptation measures should address all water cycle components and their interactions. The application of the proposed WCSP framework requires a number of tools to facilitate the tasks of working groups involved. One of these tasks is the identification and selection of appropriate risk reduction measures (RRM) to face those risks that were found to be not acceptable. The database of risk reduction measures (RRDB) is intended to facilitate the systematic identification of RRM for each risk as well as help quantifying the potential for risk reduction. This document introduces the risk reduction database structure, providing background information, a classification of RRM and presents the adopted database structure as well as the selected criteria to characterise each measure. The subsequent PREPARED tasks allow testing and improving of this initial proposal of the RRDB as well as feeding the database with data from the selected case studies of the project.