Preparing for extreme and rare events in coastal regions

The main goal of PEARL is to develop adaptive, sociotechnical risk management measures and strategies for coastal communities against extreme hydro-meteorological events minimising social, economic and environmental impacts and increasing the resilience of Coastal Regions in Europe.

To achieve its main goal, PEARL adopts a holistic risk management approach, based on the following three premises:

• Risk management is a socio-technical process, which cannot be studied by separating social and technical processes and designing them in isolation;
• The relationships between the parts are mutual, emergent, dynamic and nonlinear and are guided by the self-organising capacities of each part and the (unpredictable) dynamics of their coevolution;
• The process of strengthening any kind of flood risk mitigation measure (such as forecasting, prediction and early warning capabilities) should be understood and studied within the context of the larger flood management process which depends on interactions with other sub-processes at different levels.

PEARL implements 6 European case studies in Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Greece. GISIG is responsible for the Italian case study in Genova.