Glacial risks monitoring and management

The executive PhD project that has been held between the Fondazione Montagna sicura (FMS) and the University of Pavia, carried out by myself as the principal investigator, has been conceived in order to pursue research and development activities on the topic of the monitoring and the understanding of the dynamics and processes leading to glacial instabilities and glacial risks (Faillettaz et al., 2016; Faillettaz et al., 2015). The involvement of the CNR IRPI Section of Turin, GMG “Geohazard Monitoring Group” was fundamental in the integration of historical monitoring data and experimental activities on specific monitoring sites as well as their great input coming from their expertise in the monitoring of natural hazards and the development of innovative monitoring solutions. The research topic of the project comes from a need: even tough in the last years great improvements have been made with the use of new technologies, many times when a road closure or houses have to be evacuated for a potential glacial instability, still large uncertainties are present in many steps of the monitoring and the subsequent decision-making process. Therefore, the need for a strong integration of research activity into risk management has become a priority. In this frame, the “monitoring” side (that is mainly represented as the private investor of the PhD project, the Fondazione Montagna sicura) represents the applied side of the scientific project, while the understanding of the processes resides more on the pure scientific side that is more affine to the academic part represented by the University. The joint efforts that were put together in this frame well represent the structure of the executive PhD that should join the industry and the academia in a pathway of research and development around a common subject of interest. In the field of glacial hazards, a great leap forward for both the scientific community and policy makers involved in the managing and monitoring of glacial risk situations, has been made in recent years by the intergovernmental study group Gaphaz, with its creation first, and later with the very relevant publication of: “Assessment of Glacier and Permafrost Hazards in Mountain Regions, Technical guidance document” (Allen et al., 2022). This document, synthetises a large number of information related to destabilization phenomena in high mountain environment. A large part of the work analyses risks of glacial origin and cascading processes which will be the focus of the present work. Nonetheless, the Gaphaz document carefully describes phenomena and largely treats the early individuation of hazards and possible modelling approaches for the definition of risk scenarios. The scientifical community should refer worldwide to this document, for guidelines on an early hazard detection and a preliminary definition of risk scenarios, which represent the core of the Gaphaz work. Nonetheless, what is not comprised in this document refers to everything that happens when, on a specific site, a hazardous situation is detected, and highly destructive impacts are estimated by means of modelling approaches (Emmer et al., 2022; Mergili et al., 2020). Therefore, what comes into play is the “monitoring” phase of the phenomenon (Faillettaz et al., 2016; Pralong & Funk, 2006), and this part of the process represents the main topic of the present work. The final steps of the Gaphaz document give some indications and also some examples of what kind of approach could be used for further investigation (a general indication of possible approach is given, but not further developed) of specific sites, but this does not go into a critical analysis of existing approaches and methodologies, pros and cons, their limits, their cost and other important details. The relevance of the present work, I believe resides in the aim of screening the state of the art and deepening knowledge in this specific topic.