Three Decades of Snow Water Equivalent Dynamics in the Po River Basin, Italy: Trends and Implications

Seasonal snowpack is a key component of the mountain cryosphere, acting as a vital natural reservoir that regulates runoff downstream in snowfed basins.

 In mid- and low-elevation mountain regions such as the European Alps, snow processes, such as accumulation and ablation, are highly sensitive to climate change, having direct implications for hydrological forecasting and water availability. In this study, we present the analysis of a 30-year (1991–2021) long dataset of snow water equivalent (SWE) in the Po River District, Italy, which includes parts of the Alps and Apennines. The data is available at a 500 × 500 m2 spatial resolution and at a daily temporal scale (Dall’Amico et al., 2025). This data was generated using the “J-Snow” modeling framework, which integrates the physically based GEOtop model with in situ snow height observations and earth observation snow cover products such as MODIS. Our results show that the long-term (30 year) basin-wide mean annual SWE volume equals 3.34 Gm3. The elevation-wise statistical analysis of key snow volume and duration metrics shows that the most pronounced snow water equivalent losses occur below 2000 m a.s.l. Below this threshold, both snow volume metrics and duration metrics show a significant decrease, indicating decrease in snow water storage and earlier melt. Above this elevation, the snow volume metrics show increasing trend while as the duration metrics continue to show a shortened (decreasing trend) snow season except at the highest elevations (> 2500 m). The findings of this study highlight the changes to the mountain seasonal snow storage and the timing of snow disappearance across the Italian Alps. This combined effect highlights a fundamental shift in the hydrological regime of the Po River Basin, with significant implications for water availability and management under ongoing climate change. The data used in this paper are those freely available in Dall'Amico et al., 2025. 

References

Dall’Amico, Matteo, Stefano Tasin, Federico Di Paolo, Marco Brian, Paolo Leoni, Francesco Tornatore, Giuseppe Formetta, John Mohd Wani, Riccardo Rigon, and Gaia Roati. 2025. “30-Years (1991-2021) Snow Water Equivalent Dataset in the Po River District, Italy.” Scientific Data 12 (1): 374. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04633-5.

Wani, John Mohd, Kelly E. Gleason, Matteo Dall’Amico, Federico Di Paolo, Stefano Tasin, Gaia Roati, Marco Brian, Francesco Tornatore, and Riccardo Rigon. 2025. “Three Decades of Snow Water Equivalent Dynamics in the Po River Basin, Italy: Trends and Implications.” EGUsphere. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-5520.

Green Water and Blue Water, the Alps and the Climate Change

Thanks mostly to the work of Theodoros Mastrotheodoros and Simone Fatichi (GS), we submitted a paper to Nature Climate Change that was entitled "More green and less blue water in the Alps during warmer summers" which was eventually accepted. It  investigates under the climate change pressure the partition on water between runoff and evapotranspiration on the whole Alps with simulation on a grid of 250 m.

It is not certainly the first effort on the Alps. However,  for its resolution and quantity of data used the paper marks a benchmark for present research. Here it is its abstract:

Climate change can reduce surface-water supply by enhancing evapotranspiration in forested mountains, especially during heatwaves. Here, we investigate this “drought paradox” for the European Alps combining a new database of more than 1200 stations and hyper-resolution ecohydrological simulations to quantify the blue (runoff) and green (evapotranspiration) water fluxes. We show that during the historical 2003 heatwave, evapotranspiration in large areas over the Alps was above average, despite the exceptionally low precipitation, amplifying the runoff deficit by 32% in the most runoff- productive areas (1300 to 3000 m above the sea level). An increase in air temperature by 3 °C could enhance annual evapotranspiration by up to 100 mm (45 mm on average), which would reduce annual runoff at a rate similar to a 3% precipitation decrease. This suggests that green water feedbacks, which are often poorly represented in large-scale model simulations, pose an additional threat to water resources, especially in dry summers. We conclude that integrating hyper-resolution ecohydrological modelling into climate change impact assessment studies can support more realistic predictions of water availability in mountain regions.

By clicking on the figure you can access a preprint.

Projecting Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources in Regions of Complex Topography: A Case Study of the Western United States and Southern California

This is the talk given by Jeremy Pal (GS) in Trento on July 26, 2017. He talked about the impact of climate change and  land use on California water resources. Actually the work he presented is part of the awarded Master Thesis of Brianna Pagàn (see last slides).

The talk presents in a plane way the issue related to water resources management of South California, Los Angeles area. It then uses an impressive set of modeling tools to pass from climate and land use changes to water availability. You can enjoy the video and get the slides too.  

 

Here it is the abstract of the talk:

 

The Western United States and California have a greater potential vulnerability to climate change impacts on water resources due to a heavy reliance on snowmelt driven streamflow. California, the most agriculturally productive and populous region in the United States, depends on a complex and extensive water storage and conveyance system to supply water primarily for irrigation, municipal and industrial use and hydropower generation. This study provides an integrated approach to assess the impacts of climate change on the hydrologic cycle and extremes for all Southern Californian water supply basins:  Owens Valley, Mono Lake, Colorado River, Sacramento River, San-Joaquin River, and Tulare Lake basins. An 11-member ensemble of coupled atmosphere-ocean global climate models is first dynamically downscaled using a regional climate model and then statistically downscaled to force a hydrological model resulting in 4-km high-resolution output for the Contiguous United States. Greenhouse gas concentrations are prescribed according to historical values for the period 1976-2005 and to the IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for the near term future period 2021-2050. Precipitation is projected to remain the same or slightly increase by mid-century; however, rising temperatures result in a repartitioning of precipitation type towards more rainfall and therefore a reduced snowpack and earlier snowmelt. In addition to these hydrological changes, daily annual maximum runoff and precipitation events are projected to significantly increase in intensity and frequency such that future return periods change to become substantially more common. More specifically, the current daily annual maximum runoff 10-, 25-, and 50-, and 100-year events are projected to become approximately two to ten times more likely in the future. Furthermore, annual cumulative runoff volumes are projected to increase for high flow years and in contrast decrease for low flow years reducing the reliability of the system. While the escalating likelihood of drought reduces water supply availability, earlier snowmelt and significantly more intense winter precipitation events increases flood risk requiring winter releases from reservoirs for flood control purposes. All of these factors, coupled with projected increases in population, are likely to decrease supply during the higher demand drier months necessitating multiyear storage solutions for urban and agricultural regions as well as improved infrastructure and measures for flood control.
 

CLIMAWARE scientific outcomes

This post address the results of the scientific outcomes of the project CLIMAWARE. This was financed by our University with the main scope of gathering around a topic researchers from different Departments. We chose to work on impacts of climate on river Adige. Part of the results were posted on this blog as soon as they came out. Others will be posted eventually.
We did not obtain all the results we promised at the beginning (but we had a 20% financial cut) but, nevertheless, I think we achieve something.

• We started to match views from various disciplines. 
• We get several journal papers accepted where we pushed sciences a little forward
• We improved our models JGrass-NewAGE, Weezard, Hyperstream
• We started new experiments
• We've got fun

In you want a more complete view of our work, please look at the scientific report here. Unfortunately it is in Italian, but a synthesis in English will follow soon. Papers below are not all specifically about river Adige but were considered as  works preliminary to the application to to it. Other more applicative papers will follow (eighteen months is not a so long period!).

In Spring we will organise a meeting day where we will summarise our results and talk about spinoffs of the project.

A note: Talking with one of the colleagues who originated this type of call, he asked: how many papers did you publish together (with people from other disciplines)? The papers you published with your guys, you would have had in any case.
You can see looking below and judge yourself (but the picture will be complete in a year from now).
My answer was: first it is not really true that I (we) would have published the same amount of papers. Some of the papers were produced because money sustained those not already enrolled at University who took care, at least, of many details.
Secondly,
a) eighteen months is a too short period to produce something together (really new stuff, I mean) with people you did not interacted before;
b) Spatial and temporal scale of different disciplines can be really different. It is not easy to fill the gaps. A project like our can make researches getting closer but not eliminate the differences magically.
c) Often proper journals for these interdisciplinary efforts are missing. Sci. Total Environ. (a.k.a. Stoten) is one of them, but it has its own targets to be respected, too.

References (published so far: several others are ongoing)

Abera, W.W., Brocca L, and Rigon R., Abera, W., Brocca, L., Rigon, R. (2016).
Comparative evaluation of different satellite rainfall estimation products and bias correction in the Upper Blue Nile (UBN) basin. Atmospheric Research, 178-179, 471?483. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2016.04.017, 2016.

Berzi, D., Fraccarollo, L., 2015: Turbulence Locality and Granular-like Fluid Shear Viscosity in Collisional Suspensions. Physical Review Letters, 115,
194501-1-194501-5, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.194501.

Berzi, D., Fraccarollo L., 2016: Intense sediment transport: Collisional to turbulent suspension. Physics of Fluids, 28, 023302, doi: 10.1063/1.4941770.

Formetta, G., Bancheri M., Rigon R., Testing site-specific parameterizations of longwave radiation integrated in a GIS-based hydrological model,  Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 4641-4654, 2016

doi:10.5194/hess-20-4641-2016

Geneletti, Sartori, Schiavo, 2016. The impact of climate and land use change on agriculture in Europe: A computable general equilibrium analysis, Mimeo.

Larcher, M., Jenkins, J.T., 2015: “The evolution of segregation in dense inclined flows of binary mixtures of spheres”. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 782, 405-429.

Rigon R., Bancheri M., Green T., Age-ranked hydrological budgets and a travel time description of catchment hydrology, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 4929-4947, 2016,

doi:10.5194/hess-20-4929-2016}

Rigon R. , Bancheri M. , Formetta G. , deLavenne A. , The geomorphic unit hydrograph from a historical-critical perspective, Earth Sci. Proc. and Landforms, 41(1), 27-37, 2016.

Sartori, Schiavo, Fracasso, Riccaboni, 2016. Modeling the future evolution of the virtual water trade network: A combination of network and gravity models. SIS Working Paper No 2016-4, August 2016 (inviato a Advances in Water Resource Management).

Scolozzi R., Geneletti D., 2016: The anthroposphere as an anticipatory system: Open questions on steering the climate. Sci. Total Environ. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.10.086.

Is possible to get the runoff for European Countries ?

This is a conversation between two groups of the CLIMAWARE project of some general interest. Further information about global or continental scale hydrology can be found in some previous posts.

Dear Alberto and Riccardo, 

we are writing about the data we need for the project CLIMAWARE. 

The objective of out analysis is to estimate the impacts on agricolture of modification of:

1)  soil use

2)  anything due to the changed water availability as a consequence of the climate change. 

We are thinking to consider two time frames, the first up to 2020, the second up to 2040 (this because the estimation of soil use variation are available for these two dates and to do an analysis on the national scale for all the Countries of the European Community. 

Martina

Alberto's answer:

Dear Martina,

for what I know, there are not detailed projections at this scale. I saw studies on the largest basins (as  Danube) where all is solved by putting R = P- E (runoff = precipitation - potential evapotranspiration). For what I know, nobody looks at the national scale, for the reasons that the river basins do not coincide with nations areas.

There are regional studies (not about the countries but  for Southern Europe, for instance) made by Giorgi’s group or by Julich’s colleagues using their Earth system model. 

Bruno Majone answer:

Dear Martina,

what you are opening is a Pandora’s vessel. I try to explain it better. To deal with water availability at European scale, there are many different approaches. The simplest is to do a hydrological budget simply by using the available climatic projections. Alternatively, one can use hydrological models working at pan-european scale that can be fed directly by the projections themselves. For any of the choices the real problem is selecting the right forcings. There isn’t a reference dataset: there are various “ensemble” of simulations derived from various climate models, each one of them following a different pathways scenarios.  The reference initiative for Europe is Euro-cordex that gathers the modelling work of various research groups that perform experiments with global and regional climate models, and scale down the results from a coarse grid of 125 km to one of around 25 km (see the pdf). Considering the results of these models one should observe that usually they have strong biases that need to be corrected. Otherwise the water budgets can be extremely wrong. For what I know, inside the Euro-Cordex group there are groups that are examining and providing scenarios by using various techniques of bias correction, but I am not sure that they are already available and usable. 

If your interest is to have annually aggregated data by country, I personally would not explore thid road because I believe that the effort to contact the active groups, download huge datasets and precess them could be overwhelming.

I would try instead to contact groups that already have hydrological models setup at European scale and are already estimating climate change impacts. Alberto mentioned the Julich group, but another possibility could be JRC. They have their model LIFSFLOOD set up at 5*5 km of resolution (and it could be that they already have used it to do some impact studies).  At this point you should ask for they to send some gridded data of runoff and afterwards aggregate them at country level.

Economy, Water, Climate change. Methods and scale of analysis in economy.

This talk, of the CLIMAWARE project series, was given by Martina Sartori, a young economist, part of the group of the project. The talk was the occasion to exchange information about the type of models and the scale of modelling economists use to assess the impacts of variation of water availability on the economic system.

Click on the Figure to get the presentation.
I have to say that the discussion was interesting. The scale economists use is much larger than catchment scale, mostly because their models are parametrised on the knowledge of nations' exchanges more than regional ones. Model themselves seem not to be very complex from the mathematical point of view, but they treat thousands of parameters which makes them complicates. These parameters are collected by specialised companies and/or institutions by sorting out transactions among countries and looking at the global market. Probably the theoretical foundations of these models could not be so unassailable, but, however, they embeds a lot of empirical knowledge. For us was important to talk together.

Climate modelling of Alpine Areas

Our project CLIMAWARE started last May and will endure for the whole 2016. It tries to use climate projections to estimate impacts on water resources, and from there, to ecosystem services and society in general. The scope of the model is very wide, since it aims also to join expertise and people coming from different disciplines. In order to have a unified language inside the group we started a series of talks. The first one was given by Lavinia Laiti,  for the group of Atmospheric Physics of our Department. Here below, clicking on the image, please find her seminar's slides (in Italian). 

For sake of convenience, I report here below the bibliography that was cited. Notably, the same topics were also covered at the Alpine Convention held in September 2014 in Trento. Who is interested can find the slides here. 

References

Auer et al. (2007): HISTALP - Historical instrumental climatological surface time series of the Greater Alpine Region. Int. J. Climatol., 27, 17- 46. 

Beniston et al. (2007): Future extreme events in European climate - an exploration of regional climate model projections. Climatic Change 81, 71–95. 

Brunetti et al. (2006): Precipitation variability and changes in the greater Alpine region over the 1800-2003 period. J. Geophys. Res., 111, D11107. 

Brunetti et al. (2009): Climate variability and change in the Greater Alpine Region over the last two centuries based on multi-variable analysis. Int J Climatol, 29, 2197-2225. 

Bucchignani et al. (2013). Simulation of the climate of the XX century in the Alpine space. Nat. Hazards, 67, 981–990.

Bucchignani et al. (2015): High-resolution climate simulations with COSMO-CLM over Italy: performance evaluation and climate projections 

for the 21st century. Int. J. Climatol., DOI: 10.1002/joc.4379
Frei et al. (2003). Daily precipitation statistics in regional climate models: Evaluation and intercomparison for the European Alps. J. Geophys. 

Res., 108(D3), 4124.

Frei et al. (2006), Future change of precipitation extremes in Europe: Intercomparison of scenarios from regional climate models, J. 

Geophys. Res., 111, D06105.

Frei and Schär (1998): A precipitation climatology of the Alps from high-resolution rain-gauge observations. Int. J. Climatol., 18, 873-900. Giugliacci et al. (2010). Manuale di Meteorologia, 2nd ed. Alpha Test, 763 pp.

Gobiet et al. (2014): 21st century climate change in the European Alps - A review. Sci. Tot. Env., 493, 1138-1151.

Haslinger et al. (2013). Regional climate modelling over complex terrain: an evaluation study of COSMO-CLM hindcast model runs for the  Greater Alpine Region. Climate Dynamics 40, 511-529.

Haylock et al.(2008): A European daily high-resolution gridded dataset of surface temperature and precipitation for 1950-2006. Journal of Geophysical Research, 113, D20.

Isotta et al. (2014): The climate of daily precipitation in the Alps: development and analysis of a high-resolution grid dataset from pan-Alpine rain-gauge data. Int. J. Climatol., 34, 1657–1675. 

Jacob et al. (2014): EURO-CORDEX: new high-resolution climate change projections for European impact research. Regional Environmental Change, 14, 563-578. 

Kotlarski et al. (2015): The elevation dependency of 21st century European climate change: an RCM ensemble perspective. Int. J. Climatol. Montesarchio et al. (2014): Performance evaluation of high-resolution regional climate simulations in the Alpine space and analysis of 

extreme events, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos.,119.

Philipona (2013): Greenhouse warming and solar brightening in and around the Alps. Int. J. Climatol., 33, 1530-1537.

Prein et al. (2011): Analysis of uncertainty in large scale climate change projections over Europe. Meteorol. Zeit., 20, 383-395.

Prein et al. (2013): Added value of convection permitting seasonal simulations. Clim. Dyn. 41, 2655–2677.

Rajczak et al. (2013). Projections of extreme precipitation events in regional climate simulations for Europe and the Alpine Region, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, 3610–3626.

Schär et al. (1998): Current Alpine climate. In Cebon P. et al. (eds.), A View from the Alps: Regional Perspectives on Climate Change. MIT Press.

Suklitsch et al. (2011): Error characteristics of high resolution regional climate models over the Alpine area. Climate Dynamics, 37, 377-390. 

Torma et al. (2015), Added value of regional climate modeling over areas characterized by complex terrain—Precipitation over the Alps, J. 

Geophys. Res. Atmos., 120, 3957–3972.

Turco et al. (2013): Assessing gridded observations for daily precipitation extremes in the Alps with a focus on northwest Italy, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 13, 1457-1468. 

Von Hardenberg et al. (2015):Observations and modelling of precipitation and the hydrological cycle: uncertainties and downscaling. Trento, 4 giugno 2015. 

Web

https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data 

http://prudence.dmi.dk/ 

http://www.ensembles-eu.org/ 

http://www.cordex.org/ 

Can we trust climate models ?

We trust that climate change is happening. Data said it. IPCC reports, and the studies related, said it. A reliable site details all of it. And I personally trust the conclusions I read. 100%.

However, as modellers, or scientists, we have to continue to investigate about models reliability. All of my scientific activity is in discussing issues related to land-atmosphere interactions, where I know there is much road to run in front to us, and land-atmosphere interactions in climate models are not an exception.

A few readings made me to write this blogpost. The first brought to my attention this TEDx talk by Steve Easterbrook, in which he analyses how Climate Models are built, in order to justify their correctness. Interesting is also his paper on GMD that treats the case.  He, and coauthor, J. Pipitone,  applied methods of software analysis to infer models quality.  I found the method they used interesting but not decisive (not applicable to my model for instance). However the introduction, and the overall arguments in their paper,  are a point of view to keep firmly in mind.  Nice the discussion about what is a good model for scientists, as compared to what is a good model for others, for instance computer scientists.
In my opinion, Climate Science is not settled; relatively yes: detractors' arguments are really very weak.  But that there is much work to do and big room for improvements is indeed a fact.
Here it comes the other paper, by I.C. Prentice (GS), recently published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, where he also presents a nice and informative review of climate models. The paper, when it goes to the details of what a new model should be is pretty much VIC+ oriented (which could  be  not  new enough to some), but it is crystal clear in singling out some of the more important aspects of the matter.  Reading it is good.

Downscaling of climate projections and sources of uncertainties

This is (actually the second) seminar of the series of CLIMAWARE's.  The report of the first one will follow soon. The topic is: Observations and modelling of precipitation and the hydrological cycle: uncertainties and downscaling and is all about the local impacts of Climate Change.

These slides come to highlight the work of Jost von Hardenberg (GS), Elisa Palazzi (GS), Silvia Terzago and others in downscaling the projection of GCMs in order to obtain very local statistics of climate suitable to be applied, for instance, at the scale of river Adige or its main tributaries. One interesting strategy they follow is to use WRF,  i.e. a weather forecast models, to obtain such projections. We think to use their expertise to drive our hydrologic simulations in the project.

Fifth Water Conference Selected Presentations on Impacts of Climate Change on Alpine Regions

As any two years, the Alpine Convention organised the a "Water Conference" to assess the results of the Water Platform, which I had the honour to head in 2013-2014.

The fifth Water Conference was entitled: "Water in the Alps - and beyond; Adapting alpine and mountain river basins to climate change".
The event is going to be jointly promoted and developed by the Alpine Convention and the UNECE Water Convention, in order to favour the creation of synergies and the exchange of experiences (i.e. among the Alpine territory, the Carpathians, the Caucasus, Central Asia,...).

The 5th Water Conference is intended to provide to a wide audience of experts, administrators, practitioners and stakeholders the state of the art, the best practices and the main findings about adaptation to climate change in the mountain trans-boundary river basins.
Different panels of experts will illustrate the main results of the last years of activities in the respective conventions.
Furthermore, updated high-level information on climate change and adaptation strategies will be provided, together with the results of some relevant projects of European Territorial Cooperation on the issues.

Finally, a special focus will be devoted to the implementation of the measures of flood management, in the EU flood directive.

The whole set of presentations given during the conference can be found here. However, I would like to bring to attention a few outstanding, related to the impacts of climate change on the Water Cycle:

• M. Beniston,  Changes in Alpine water resources: examples from the EU «ACQWA» Project^1
• A. Bellin, The impacts of climate change on water cycle
• S. Gruber,  The changing mountain cryosphere: impacts on sediment and solute transport
• U. Morra di Cella,  Permafrost in the Alps: the experience of PermaNET project “Long-term permafrost monitoring network”
• G. Rosatti, Modelling sediment transport in Alpine rivers subject to climate changes

^1 AQWA Project

Project CLIMAWARE

Today we submitted the CLIMAWARE project: CLIMatic change impacts on future Availability of WAter REsources and hydro- geological risks.

It is a proposal internal to UNITN but it involves so many different disciplines and Departments that represent a variety that normally can be found only in EU projects. Please below, find the abstract of the project, while we cross the fingers for its approval.

                                       

The pressure of human activities on the earth system, including the water cycle, is multifaceted and intrinsically interlinked with climate change due to the inherent complexity of natural and human processes. The interaction of humans with the environment is strongly non-linear and is dominated by multiple feedbacks and non-stationarities, which are difficult to identify and assess. Despite these complexities, the existing tools to deal with the many hazards connected to the interaction of humans with the environment are based on simple approaches, founded on the concept that the earth system is in a steady state, so that predictions on its evolution can be safely made either statistically, or through simplified models founded on the hypothesis the processes are stationary.
This proposal focuses on the interactions between climate change and human activities related to water, with a holistic view embracing physical, social and economic processes. It will consider, in particular, changes in water cycle components related to extremes and their implications in contiguous sectors. Here extremes include floods and land instabilities triggered by extreme precipitations, such as debris-flows and snow avalanches, but also different stress factors threatening the integrity of freshwater services, with adverse effects on agriculture, tourism, and energy production. New paradigms, approaches and tools will be developed in order to cope with the non-stationarity of water cycle processes and to study the entanglement between the physical processes and human activities. The proposal is interdisciplinary also regarding the physical aspects, and involves interaction between water related disciplines, such as climate science, meteorology, hydrology, fluid mechanics, and information technology for aspects related to distributed monitoring. Because of the challenges that climate change imposes, there is a need to increase general awareness of climate-related risks, and find ways to mitigate the impact on economic activities as well as to adapt to new scenarios. For mitigation and adaptation strategies to be effective, knowledge of the physical aspects of the water cycle should be combined and complemented with knowledge of social and economic processes that crucially affect the use and management of freshwater. Furthermore, it should consider that national governments, on the one hand, and the European Union, on the other, have started to enact laws aimed at countering the effects of climate change. The implementation of these measures and their harmonization with existing laws, however, is not without problems. This might require some legal creativity – and the interaction of law with other hard- and social sciences – to bring about effective results.

Project Description, highlighting the interdisciplinarity (excerpt)

Climate change mitigation and adaptation require substantial changes in production and consumption patterns, as well as in individual behaviors. This is particularly true for water- related sectors, which are a linchpin in the production of beverages, food and energy, and for many recreational activities. However, in economics, estimates of water resource availability are rarely made on a solid quantitative basis. Also, the systematic preemptive estimation of extremes caused by hydrological events is a science in its infancy. The recent advances in hydrology and water related sciences open interesting perspective for new methods and models to support a better informed decision making process at all levels, from local to national and international. Moreover, societal and economic concerns receive only marginal attention in the debate [1]. Arguably, the gap between science, society and policymakers undermines the decision-making process.

The interdisciplinary approach of this project, which combines insights from hard sciences with sociology, economics and law, represents an important step towards bridging the gap between science and society, and raising awareness of the benefits of cooperation between disciplines. The project studies the complex interplay between physical and human processes in controlling the distribution, in space and time, of water resources by considering both actual and possible future climatic and societal scenarios. The project is organized in five interconnected Tasks (Figure 1): Task 1 evaluates the drivers of water resource availability; Task 2 assesses climate change and human impacts on water resources and local hydro-geological extremes (underestimated according to a report by WMO [2]); Task 3 addresses the development of suitable tools for describing and modeling environmental granular flow extremes and sediment transport; Tasks 4 and 5 aim for better management of water resources, specifically, Task 4 uses the paradigm of virtual water to assess the regional impact of the food trade, while Task 5 tries to envisage effective societal responses to climate change.

A full description of the project, financed by UNITN5, can be found here.

References

1. Malnes, R.; Environmental Politics 17(4), 660-672, 2008.
2. http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/drr/transfer/2014.06.12WMO1123_Atlas_120614.pdf

Climate Change Adaptation strategies - Brescia Workshop on October 10 2013 presentations

Among the duties for the Alpine Convention's Water Platform there is the organisation of workshops with the scope to share experiences of best practices among the alpine countries. Best practices, in this case for the adaptation to Climate Change with respect to Flood Risk and Water Management.

In Brescia, last month, officers of Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia met and developed an interesting conversation on these topics.



Here you can access to all of the presentations:

The Austrian Strategy for adaptation to climate change (focus water ressources and water management) by: Mario Unterwainig, Division Water management in residential areas Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management

Bavarian Climate Programme 2020
by: Christian Wanger Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment and Public Health

CC Adaptation Strategy in Italy: from national level to the Alpine region
by: Paolo Angelini, Ministry of the Environment, Land and Sea and by Antonio Ballarin-Denti, Lombardy Foundation for the Environment

Flood event June 2013 in Bavaria Lessons learned in managing natural hazards
by: Bavarian Environment Agency

Management of water issues in the adaption plans
by: Rudolf Hornich Federal Government of Styria Watermanagement

Inland water ecosystems: critical issues in the management of water quantity and quality and monitoring priorities
by: Pierluigi Viaroli, Department of Life Sciences, University of Parma, Italy

Alpine Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change in the Field of Natural Hazards Platform on Natural Hazards of the Alpine Convention PLANALP by: Andreas Pichler, Member of PLANALP Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management

Governing Disasters under a changing climate: Challenges, Limitations, Lessons learnt. An Austrian perspective
by: Andreas Pichler, BMLFUW, Austria

Conflicts and difficulties in the integration of WFD and Flood Directive: nature vs. protection?by:Tobias Hafner, Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment and Public Health

Climate Change and Risk Management in Switzerland Case study Grindelwald
by: Hugo Aschwanden, Swiss Federal Office for the Environment

Thoughts about the "best" planning instrument for climate change adaptation on local scale on the example of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano
by: Andreas Paul Zischg, PLANALP – Italian delegation

Floods on Drava River Basin November 2012 in Slovenia - Lessons learned
by: Milica Slokar, Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Slovenia Administration for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief (ACPDR) and by Jože Papež, HIDROTEHNIK Water management, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Activities on water and adaptation to climate change in the framework of the UNECE Water Convention
by: Sarah Tiefenauer-Linardon, UNECE Water Convention

The funding possibilities to build up adaptation capacities and take action
by: Federica Alcozer Studio GAP associati, planning consultant

Regional Adaptation Strategy: the case of Lombardy Region by: Antonio Ballarin-Denti. Dept. of Mathematics and Physics, Catholic University, Brescia Lombardy Foundation for the Environment

Other information about the adaptation strategies to Climate Changes (in the Alpine region) can be found in this previous post.

Clima Trentino (About Trentino Climate and adaptation to Climate Change)

I will use this page to collect all the material about Climate change impacts related to Water and Hydrology (and at relatively small scales) going towards the Fitfth Water Conference of the Alpine Convention (to be held in September 25-26 2014) which will cover this topic in detail.
I will start with the material (In Italian) of the meeting Clima: quale futuro per la Terra (Climate which future  form Earth) which I co-organized with Clima Trentino the recent October 21.
You will find two presentations the first a very nice introduction to climate change and adaptation by Antonio Navarra, and the second about the Italian strategy to Climate change adaptation by Sergio Castellari. Both of them of the  Center euro-Mediterranean for  Climate Change (CMCC).

The Italian National strategy was finally disclosed yesterday by the Italian Ministry of Environment,  Andrea Orlando, and can be found here.

Yesterday I also met Marcela Olmedo, an anthropologist who works on Adaptation of Climate Change and Water. She is the author of an interesting blog: http://www.environmentalanthropology.net and her woork on climate change adaptation can be found here.

The presentations and work of the Workshop on Climate Change Adaptation held in Brescia on October 10th, and organised by the Water Platform of the Alpine Convention, can instead be found here.

The seminar on the KultuRisk EU Project, held in Trento November the 5th by Paolo Ronco of University of Venice, can be accessed from here.

Alpine Spring Festival

From march 4 to march 8 at EURAC in Bozen was held the Alpine Spring Festival. This was the occasion for some of the Alpine Convention Water Platform participants to meet.
The topic covered during the meeting were the impacts of the climate change on alpine water catchments and ecosystem.

Besides the presentation of the water platform three presentations were given about:

• The impact of climate change on the water cycle, by Bruno Majone and Alberto Bellin
• The impacts of climate change on ecosystems and  biosphere, by Roberta Bottarin
• Changing bussinnes in changing climate, by Heike Bach