Transport security and accessibility are essential for a balanced and sustainable development of the Alpine Space. Due to current climatic trends, the vulnerability of transport infrastructure to natural hazards has increased. But the specific threats to transport infrastructure have not yet been tackled in a systematic joint effort. Therefore the goal of PARAmount is to improve risk management strategies for infrastructure protection by the adaptation of existing tools and practices to these special requirements. The project consortium is of cross-sectoral character: key actors from transport and natural hazards management are integrated as project partners and observers. Long-term practical implementation will be assured by the establishment of regional risk dialogue. This will improve risk awareness, quality of decisions and positive impacts of PARAmount measures.

Project work for both the administrative, public-relation and the thematical work-packages has started on time: Working plans were defined and working groups were installed; the partners identified their regional test-beds, giving a testbed description for each single test-bed-region. Some project-partners already established closer connections with their observers, stakeholder-meetings were organized to analyze the present situation of their problems and needs. Joint efforts were made to design one scheme and set of questions for the stakeholder questioning and expert interviews as well as the online survey which will then be implemented in 5 selected testbeds in Austria, Slovenia, Italy, France and Switzerland. The goal is to assess the risk awareness and risk perception among the defined target groups. Various contracts with external experts were signed.

The first outputs of the project were the project-logo, the project-website, a project-handbook distributed to the project-partners, templates for project-documents, financial-monitoring-system. For work-package 4, 2 transnational and various bilateral and national project meetings gave the possibility to take decisions regarding methodology and subcontractors. Concerning intermediate outputs it is important to mention the testbed descriptions for 11 regional testbeds, working-meetings with stakeholders in all participating countries, lists of stakeholders for the surveys in 5 selected testbeds, an invitation letter in 3 different languages signed by the lead partner. Project partners 5 and 6 laid the basis for the realization of a debris flow hazard map by building a GIS database that was presented to the observers to begin the data collection. The Slovenian project partner carried out a field survey of the test-bed area together with maintainers of railway and protection objects in this section.

The main focus in the upcoming months will be the finalization of the survey on risk awareness. Furthermore data collection activities on the test bed level will be intensified following the defined common procedures. Based on that, the actual risk situation in the regional test beds will be assessed resulting in detailed hazard-maps. Parallel to the work in the test beds, first steps will be taken to adapt existing hazard management tools to the requirements of the transport sector.