Thesis title: MONITORING, MODELING AND FORECASTING EXTREME HYDROLOGICAL EVENTS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON COASTAL RECLAMATION AREAS UNDER CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS
Coastal regions are extremely important for Europe’s economy, about 40% of the European population lives within an area of 50 km from the coast. Approximately 40% of the EU’s GPD is generated by activities related to maritime areas and some of 75% of the EU’s foreign trade is naval. Coastal regions host activities such as shipping, resource extraction, tourism, renewable energy and fishing. Climate change is likely to make these regions and the societies that inhabit them more vulnerable. This deterioration threatens the continuing health of our coastal areas and therefore their management must be conducted by balancing the economic interests to ensure human development and healthy, resilient coastal ecosystems. The coastal regions are heavily man-made and subject to phenomena such as floods, saline intrusion, subsidence whose consequences can be further aggravated by extreme meteorological events and sea level rise. The importance of extreme hydrological events which are among the main causes of loss of human life and economic damages. The new paradigm of non-stationarity of hydrological time series (Milly et al., 2008) in the light of recent modeling studies that have highlighted the risk of an intensification and increase in frequency of extreme events suggests monitoring these regions and equipping them with management systems of the water resource. Damage from extreme weather has increased dramatically over the past few decades. The risk of flooding is destined to increase in the future due to an increase in vulnerability caused by the increase in anthropogenic occupation of flood zones, by changes in land use, by changes in river regimes and by climate change. The choice of policies in order to mitigate the hydraulic risk must be based on the right risk assessment taking into account the uncertainties related to the probability of occurrence of the events and the expected damage (Apel et al., 2004). In order to address the need to identify design and timing of defense constructions taking into account the uncertainties in climate projections, also in presence of abrupt changes of climate forcing, a multi-objective optimization approach which integrates hydraulic modelling for simulating flooding and its consequences is proposed.