BECCA: Ecologically sustainable and safe basins designed to adapt to climate change.
Program/Financing
- ALCOTRA VI France-Italy program
- section A "New challenges
- AP Simple
- Specific objective 2.iv. "Promote climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and resilience, taking into account ecosystem-based approaches".
Themes
Climate change adaptation and risk prevention
Partners
Project leader: Aosta Valley Autumn Region
Italian partners :
- Turin Polytechnic
- Piedmont Region
French partners:
- INRAE: 3 Research units
- USMB
By 2022, all climate indicators point to drier-than-average conditions in most of Western Europe, and in the Alps in particular, confirming the climate change trend of recent decades, with serious repercussions for mountain areas.
In particular, climate change has caused :
- A lack of winter snow has damaged winter sports resorts;
- Severe summer droughts are affecting agriculture in rural mountain areas, community drinking water supplies, forest fires and hydroelectric power generation.
In an attempt to reduce the effects of climate change, administrations and land management bodies are striving to identify effective and environmentally sustainable solutions for climate change adaptation, with an emphasis on ecosystem-based approaches.
One of the possible solutions that has been identified is the creation of small reservoirs distributed in mountainous contexts that can mitigate the impacts of climate change, while guaranteeing an adequate degree of safety for the territories and communities that live there. The main aim of the BECCA project - Ecologically Sustainable and Safe Reservoirs, Designed to Adapt to Climate Change - is to ensure the proper design of reservoirs and the safety of existing ones.
Activities
- Designing and building small and medium-sized reservoirs in the context of climate change
- Design of reservoirs with low environmental impact, better integrated into their environment and adopting naturalistic engineering solutions
- Assessing reservoir-related risks and adapting civil protection plans
Impacts
Appropriate land-use planning, based on a multi-criteria analysis, to meet the emerging needs of cross-border Alpine territories following drought episodes.
Better integration of small and medium-sized, safe and inexpensive cross-border reservoirs in mountainous contexts, using nature-based solutions.
Increasing the resilience of the population through participative actions aimed at developing tools that take into account the risk of dam failure.
Results
Cross-border/multi-criteria methodology implemented to identify areas where small and medium-sized reservoirs should be designed and built to meet the population's demand for water resources following increasingly frequent drought episodes.
Increase in the number of technicians and professionals trained in the design and construction of safe cross-border reservoirs for altered conditions resulting from climate change, including naturalistic engineering techniques to reduce impacts on alpine ecosystems.
Increase in the number of municipalities adapting their civil protection plans to the risk of dam failure.
USMB's contribution
Against a backdrop of climate change leading to increasingly dry conditions in Europe, and particularly in the Alpine arc, due to the combined effects of low precipitation and high temperatures, the BECCA project aims to respond to the design of safe reservoirs and the rehabilitation of existing reservoirs, adopting nature-based techniques, respectful of the environment and biodiversity, in order to compensate for the lack of snow in winter, which is detrimental to winter sports resorts, and the need for water for agriculture during droughts in summer, and, more generally, to meet the challenges that climate change imposes on mountain regions.
The main objective of the USMB's contribution to the BECCA project will be to propose methods and tools for the design and construction of small and medium-sized reservoirs in mountain and foothill areas, which are environmentally friendly, safe, respectful of biodiversity and provide an integrated response to climate change.
Find out more about the project
