The eastern Alps, including the Italian-Slovenian-Austrian borders, as well the region of South-East Europe, are characterized by strong seismicity. Historically, these regions have been hit by many severe earthquakes, but are also prone to hydro-meteorological hazards (e.g. Floods, Flash Floods). Earthquake and flood risks in these regions may be amplified due to the lack of a common prevention and preparedness framework concerning the impact of those  hazards, especially in cross-border areas.   Thus, it is necessary to establish harmonized cross-border approaches for assessing and communicating the multi-risks accounting for the seismic and hydro-meteorological hazards.

The BORIS project focuses on the assessment of seismic risk and flood risk, having cross-border impact-potential in several countries participating in the Union Civil Protection Mechanism. Typically, the transboundary risk assessment requires the use of shared approaches, employing common data type and analysis models, and allowing to represent the impact in a shared framework established among the countries. The BORIS activities are in line with the preventing disaster risk policies defined by the EC, with the decision N. 1313/2013/EU on a Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM), calling the Participating States to develop national risk assessment (NRA) periodically.

BORIS aims at increasing the protection from cross-border disasters by developing:

• Shared methodology for single and multi-risk assessment, which will allow the evaluation of expected consequences for single natural hazards as well as multi-risk impact comparison and ranking in transboundary regions
• A platform for single and multi-risk assessment and representation, which will facilitate the storage and updating of data, models and documentation, representation of damage and impact results with a harmonized approach, as well as results visualization and sharing for an agreed and shared transboundary risk assessment.

Further, the methodology and platform will be practically applied in two cross-border sites involving seismic and flood risk as well as multi-hazard risk assessment. This will allow to evaluate the data needed in the selected cross-border sites, test the procedures and effectively perform cross-border seismic and flood risk assessment, as well as multi-risk comparison and ranking.

More information can be found under www.borisproject.eu.