Hydro-climatic resilience of Austrian land - water systems

Extreme events cause significant economic damage and social disruption. Climate-related risks will increase in the future as the frequency and scale of natural hazards and risk management change. Agricultural and forestry activities in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to river floods and droughts. It is becoming increasingly important to harmonise disaster risk management and climate change adaptation policies and practices. The HydrATer project focuses on the holistic governance and management of flood and drought risks to improve the resilience of Austrian land-water systems. This includes land-use changes in forested and agricultural areas, their impacts on water quantity and quality, and the causes of these changes. Society must adapt and governments must prioritise, accelerate and strengthen their response mechanisms to extreme events. This requires innovative risk management to manage uncertainty, reduce duplication of effort, make more efficient use of public resources and protect communities, economies and ecosystems. HydrATer will develop a model to analyse the impact of climatic and socio-economic changes and extreme events on decision-making by land users, the water sector and local and regional decision-makers, and to determine the consequences for watercourses, water quantity and quality, and aquatic ecosystem functions. The model will be applied to the Eisenwurzen region. Together with regional stakeholders, the effects of interventions in the region and on sectors will be interactively presented in a transdisciplinary process through a series of workshops and participatory scenario building. The model serves as a communication tool and is used by stakeholders as a decision support tool. HydrATer`s innovative inter- and transdisciplinary approach integrates (i) different dimensions of resilience, (ii) specific institutional frameworks and (iii) specific adaptation needs to (iv) develop a decision support tool that analyses the impacts of climate change in combination with policy interventions on land use and water systems. The research team combines social and natural science disciplines relevant to the research themes (risk and risk management, social ecology, hydrology and aquatic ecology). In addition, we have a strong transdisciplinary research approach, which enables us to develop visions for regional resilience together with social actors.