We’re happy to share with you the latest edition of our BORIS newsletter, showcasing project and work package updates as well as events. Download it here:

Last Monday, BORIS team member Gabriella Tocchi presented a paper about the BORIS project at XIX ANIDIS conference, a National Conference on Seismic Engineering in Italy that took place in Turin, Italy.

The work presented was titled “Seismic risk assessment in transboundary areas: the case study on the border between Italy and Slovenia” and illustrates the methodology proposed within BORIS project to perform harmonized cross-border seismic risk assessment in the transboundary region, with an application at Italy and Slovenia border for the city of Gorizia and Nova Gorica. The authors of this paper are M. Polese, G. Tocchi, M. Dolsek, A. Babik, M. Faravelli, D. Quaroni, B. Borzi, A. Prota.

The above paper presented at the conference will be indexed on SCOPUS and published on Procedia Structural Integrity (ELSEVIER).

IAHR World Congress took place from June 19-24 in Granada, Spain. The International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) brought together the international research community, inviting them to contribute to the conference’s central theme “From Snow to Sea”, linking past with present and focusing attention on the importance of considering the integral water cycle to address present and future challenges.

Our colleagues Klaudija Lebar and Simon Rusjan from the University of Ljubljana presented their submission in the form of a poster. We’re happy to provide you the poster as a download here:

We are happy to announce that the next BORIS project deliverables – of work package 4, Shared methodology for multi-risk assessment – are now available for download.

Deliverable 4.1 Guidelines for cross-border risk assessment: Shared framework for single and multi-risk assessment at cross-border sites

Deliverable 4.2 State of the art of tools for seismic risk, flood risk and multi-risk assessment

On June 22 and 23, the BORIS consortium met at Vienna for their first in-presence workshop since the start of the project. As the pandemic had made it impossible for the project partners to meet in person previously, it was a pleasure to finally meet everyone without the help of video conferencing.

The meeting took place at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, organized and hosted by the DCNA. The purpose of the workshop was not just to be an extended internal project meeting but also to have external stakeholders on board to communicate project progress too but also to receive feedback and inputs.

The workshop started with an exercise and overview of competencies and skills of internal and external participants, followed by a presentation of project progress, including the BORIS platform for cross-border risk assessment. Joining us from the European Commission was Tiberiu-Eugen Antofie (JRC Disaster Risk Management Unit) who also provided insights into the Risk Data Hub.

In the following interactive session, small groups discussed different aspects of the project, the platform, and future ideas for expanding the risk assessment methodologies and applications.

All presentations and documentation will be available on our website in the near future.

We are very grateful for all the valuable inputs and the great cooperation within the project consortium and look forward to the next workshop in September in Ljubljana.

Our colleagues Klaudija Lebar and Simon Rusjan from the University of Ljubljana will be presenting at this year’s IAHR2022 in Granada, Spain. Their submission titled “Review of a national flood risk assessment as a basis for developing a methodology for selected cross-border areas – BORIS project” illustrates the results of the analysis and comparison of national flood risk assessment tools, vulnerability, exposure elements, and impact indicators in Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Montenegro, and Turkey.

The result: It was found that flood risk assessment methodologies vary from one country to another which will make the flood risk assessment in cross-border areas a demanding task.

Link to the conference: Welcome – 39th IAHR World Congress. Granada Spain 2022 (iahr2021.org)

We’re happy to announce that our second BORIS newsletter is now available for download. After 16 months of working on the BORIS project, there is quite a lot to report – from finalized deliverables to information about upcoming activities, for example, the planned workshops and trainings for end users.

Feel free to download and share the newsletter with your peers and reach out to us if you have any questions.

Want to get an overview of the first 12 months of BORIS? Read our first newsletter here >

Work package 5 of the BORIS project deals with testing and applying the shared methodology to assess seismic and flood risk in transboundary regions and the multi-risk framework developed in WP4, as well as to test and populate the platform developed in WP3. More details about WP5 can be found here.

On February 24th, WP5 was kicked off in a meeting with the work package team. The meeting’s agenda was as follows:

• Overview tasks and deliverables in WP 5
• First insights into the pilot site AUT/SLO (DCNA)
• First insights into the pilot site SLO/IT and D5.2 (UL)
• Open questions and next steps

Looking forward to seeing first results!

Last week, the BORIS project team met to brief all partners on the results of the following WP4 tasks:

4.1 Shared methodology for seismic risk assessment

In brief, the 2020 European Seismic Hazard Model (ESHM20) was selected for all countries and the Heuristic approach proposed to evaluate vulnerability for cross-border application. The municipality scale was selected as scale of analysis and common typological classes were defined; and finally, a uniform approach for impact assessment was defined. 

4.2 Shared methodology for flood risk assessment

The proposed algorithm to interpolate flood hazard maps between two different return periods was presented, and the exposure, vulnerability data, and the human and economic impacts used to evaluate flood risk were shown. 

The team also presented the proposal for task 4.3 Shared framework for Multi-risk comparison and ranking, showing issues and highlighting tools.

After an in-depth and fruitful discussion on multi-risk comparison, the next steps were agreed upon and the dates for publishing deliverables D4.1. and D4.2 (corresponding to the above-mentioned tasks) set.

We’re looking forward to sharing these deliverables with you in March!

We’re excited to publish the next deliverable of the BORIS project:

Deliverable 3.1: Architecture of the platform

This deliverable deals with the specifications related to the website and the WebGIS platform to be developed in the BORIS project considering updated data from previous work packages.

The web-based approach was chosen to integrate the ease of use and accessibility of a web browser and the capabilities of geographic databases.

Section 5 is dedicated to the results of the survey on end-user requirements, that asked about individuals’ experiences with cross-border flood and earthquake events and about their requirements towards a cross-border and multi-risk web platform.