MYRIAD-EU: Improving disaster risk management through multi-hazard and multi-sector risk assessment

Droughts can cause forest fires or food and water shortages. When it rains heavily on a dried soil, floods can occur, making shortages worse or triggering the outbreak of diseases. Disaster risks are interconnected and can trigger and amplify each other. Being able to anticipate how risks interact is essential in preventing and mitigating disasters.

“The key novelty of the MYRIAD-EU project is that it is not looking at a single hazard or a single sector, but it is looking at several risks and sectors at the same time and how they interact”, says Anne Sophie Daloz, Senior Research at CICERO who is part of the MYRIAD-EU research consortium. The project will study compound, triggering, amplification and consecutive  events. An example of this types of events for Scandinavia is a forest fire occurring as a result of a long drought and heatwave.

The Multi-hazard and sYstemic framework for enhancing Risk-Informed mAnagement and Decision-making in the E.U (MYRIAD-EU) will co-develop the first harmonized framework for multi-hazard, multi-sector, and systemic risk management. At the heart of the MYRIAD-EU laboratory of systemic multi-hazard risk assessment and management are the five pilots. The interlinkages between the different hazards and economic sectors will be studied.

In these pilot regions, the project will, in close collaboration with stakeholders, co-develop the framework. Each pilot develops a concrete disaster risk management pathway to reduce risks in the particular region. In this way the project will make sure to develop solutions to real challenges. The pilots are: F North Sea, Canary Islands, Scandinavia, Danube and Veneto.

CICERO leads the work on the Scandinavian pilot that is looking at agriculture, forestry and energy – three sectors particularly sensitive to the impacts of climate change.

Climate change is predicted to intensify several interrelated natural hazards in this region. Extreme rainfall can trigger floods while increased heat waves and drought can amplify forest fires, reduce agricultural productivity, and amplify biological hazards like the expanding habitats of the pine beetles. Low snowfall in winter associated with drought in spring and summer can destabilize the energy sector, for example when it is based on hydropower.

CICERO’s macro-economic model GRACE will be a key tool in the impact assessment that will include Norway, Finland and Sweden. GRACE will estimate how economic indicators are affected due to multiple disasters in the region. The model is featured with great flexibility and consistency to capture cross-sectional and cross-regional dependencies.“Municipalities and governments are starting to take into account  the complexity of the climate risk, but need more knowledge, so this is a timely project” says Daloz.

The project is coordinated by the VU Foundation at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. 

Partners are:
Inernational  Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Risklayer
Deltares Foundation
CMCC
Arctik SRL
Max-Planck Institute (MPI)
University de la Laguna
Hotrec
Wetlands International