Rockfall events are one of the most frequent types of mass wasting in mountainous areas, causing service and traffic disruption, as well as infrastructure and human damage. Hence, having accurate tools to model these hazards becomes crucial to prevent fatalities, especially in a context of Climate Change whereby the effects of these phenomena might be exacerbated. Under this premise, this research concerned the development of a framework for assessing rockfall hazard in mountainous areas. First, a set of factors expected to favour rockfalls were processed and aggregated using spatial analysis tools, yielding a series of hazard maps with which to fit observed data through statistical modelling. The validation process was undertaken with the support of a database containing the number of rocks removed from a mountainous road section located in Cantabria, northern Spain. The results achieved, which demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed approach to reproduce rockfall hazard using frequency data, highlighted the primary role played by factors such as slope, runoff threshold and precipitation to explain the occurrence of these events. The effects of Climate Change were considerably influenced by the fluctuations in the projections of precipitation, which limited the variations in the spatial distribution and magnitude of rockfall hazard.
Infrastructures are designed to have a long useful life, being the phase of exploitation the longest period. This phase requires important economic resources to ensure the optimum and safe conditions of service of the infrastructure. The objective of this paper is to review the main research projects carried out in the last years related to natural and climate risk analysis in infrastructures, trying to identify the future lines of research. The need to maintain the functionality of basic systems is clearly. Different international organizations and governments worldwide are taking measures to minimize the impacts that natural events may have on their infrastructures and population. In recent years, the number of research projects aimed at studying the evolution of climate, natural hazards and/or the resilience of infrastructures has increased greatly. 45 research projects related to the study of natural risks and infrastructures was reviewed. Society cannot afford to rebuild a 20-year-old infrastructure that has been built for a useful life of 100 years. This entails a high economic, environmental and social waste. Consequently, it is necessary to validate a methodology of analysis of climatic risks, which also facilitates the decision making on the measures to be established to increase resilience. Copyright
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