PERCEPCIÓN Y PREVENCIÓN DEL RIESGO POR LAHAR EN LOS DIQUES DE CARTAGO

En los Diques de Taras de Cartago reside una población con alto grado de vulnerabilidad a la ocurrencia de lahares  provenientes del  Río Reventado.  En este artículo se analiza la situación del Barrio La Unión ante un eventual lahar, tanto desde el punto de vista de la amenaza, a la que están expuestos, como de la percepción del riesgo que tienen sus habitantes.Palabras clave: Lahar, desastres naturales, percepción del riesgo, diquesAbstract:In Taras Diques, Cartago, the inhabitants are highly vulnerable to mud slides from the Reventado River. This article analyzes the situation of the La Unión Community in an event of a mud slide, from the danger`s point of view they are exposed to as well as how the inhabitants perceive the risk.Keywords: Lahar, natural disasters, perception of the risk, dikes

Double Dyke System - Natural engineering solutions

According to various studies, the effects of climate change will be a danger to ecosystems and the population, especially in coastal areas, increasing the risk of floods. Authorities are taking action to prevent future disasters using traditional engineering solutions. These solutions can have high environmental and economic costs, fixing the coastline, increasing the salinization of aquifers, and can be subject to failure mechanisms. For this reason, studies were made to use natural engineering solutions for coastal protection, instead of traditional solutions, to achieve the UN SDGs. Coastal ecosystems have the natural ability to repair and restore themselves, increasing soil elevation, and attenuating waves. One of these solutions is the Double Dyke System, consisting of creating a salt marsh between the first dyke and a second inland. The goal is to protect the coasts and to restore ecosystems. The purpose of this study is to compare the costs of natural engineering solutions with traditional ones. It is assumed that these solutions may be more effective and less expensive in the long run. For this evaluation, a suitability analysis of the polders in the Dutch Zeeland region to assess the costs and benefits under different SLR scenarios was made. A saline intrusion model was also created to analyze the effects of a salt marsh on the aquifers. From the analyzes conducted, the implementation of the DDS turns out to be the cheapest coastal defense system in all SLR scenarios. The presence of a salt marsh could also have a positive impact on the prevention of saline intrusion in the various scenarios considered. The DDS could have a positive economic and environmental impact in the long term, reducing the investment costs for coastal defense and bringing important benefits for the protection of man and nature. Despite the results, more studies are needed on the efficiency of this defense system and on the economic evaluation of non-marketable ecosystem services.

La tutela penale dell'ambiente marino. Origini, sviluppo e tecniche di tutela nel contesto nazionale, sovranazionale e comparato.

La ricerca si propone di fornire un contributo allo studio del diritto penale dell’ambiente, prendendo in considerazione la disciplina penalistica che rileva nel caso di offesa – effettiva o potenziale – delle acque marine. Nello specifico – in ragione dei sempre più frequenti casi di inquinamento e disastro ambientale causati dalle immissioni di sostanze tossiche nelle acque marine, riconducibili alle attività di impresa ed alla navigazione – l’obiettivo del lavoro è quello di soffermarsi, partendo dalla dimensione internazionale ed europea del fenomeno, sulle disposizioni penali vigenti nel nostro ordinamento a salvaguardia delle risorse naturali marine, sulle modalità con cui le stesse sono tipizzate e sui possibili autori di tali reati, valutando – in termini più generali – se sia veramente effettivo l’attuale impianto nazionale di tutela oppure se non sia necessario ripensare il ruolo del diritto penale in tale settore. Per ampliare il contesto dell’indagine, verrà presa in considerazione la corrispondente disciplina francese, spagnola e statunitense; tale scelta si fonda sulla circostanza che i tre più significativi disastri ambientali marini della storia moderna si sono verificati rispettivamente a largo delle coste bretoni (petroliera Erika), galiziane (nave Prestige) e della Louisiana (piattaforma petrolifera Deep Water Horizon).

Valutazione e gestione del rischio per i Beni Culturali: strumenti e metodologie

Il patrimonio culturale sopravvissuto fino ai giorni nostri nonostante calamità naturali ed eventi catastrofici è oggi sempre più in pericolo: gli eventi naturali, accelerati e resi ancora più distruttivi dagli effetti del cambiamento climatico, lo scoppio continuo di nuovi conflitti armati e l’inconsapevolezza con cui gli uomini sfruttano il territorio comportano un aumento dei rischi e dei possibili danni ad un patrimonio che, tuttavia, è di importanza vitale per la crescita dell’umanità. Per evitare che il patrimonio culturale venga disperso o distrutto, è necessario applicare misure di prevenzione e protezione mirate, utilizzando in maniera efficiente gli strumenti disponibili; lo scopo ultimo della prevenzione e della protezione deve essere la resilienza, che va costruita attraverso la conoscenza e l’attenta pianificazione della gestione del patrimonio. Il presente lavoro di ricerca si propone dunque di analizzare i metodi e le strategie utilizzabili per la valutazione e la gestione del rischio applicati ai beni culturali, verificando a quale livello di consapevolezza si è giunti a livello sia nazionale che internazionale, passando in rassegna le tecnologie che permettono di proteggere il patrimonio agevolando il lavoro di mitigazione del rischio e applicando un prototipo di calcolo e analisi del rischio al caso studio del Museo di Nonantola, in provincia di Modena.

Design and management of a supply chain: a joint location-inventory problem under uncertainty (Part A)

In this paper, a joint location-inventory model is proposed that simultaneously optimises strategic supply chain design decisions such as facility location and customer allocation to facilities, and tactical-operational inventory management and production scheduling decisions. All this is analysed in a context of demand uncertainty and supply uncertainty. While demand uncertainty stems from potential fluctuations in customer demands over time, supply-side uncertainty is associated with the risk of “disruption” to which facilities may be subject. The latter is caused by external factors such as natural disasters, strikes, changes of ownership and information technology security incidents. The proposed model is formulated as a non-linear mixed integer programming problem to minimise the expected total cost, which includes four basic cost items: the fixed cost of locating facilities at candidate sites, the cost of transport from facilities to customers, the cost of working inventory, and the cost of safety stock. Next, since the optimisation problem is very complex and the number of evaluable instances is very low, a "matheuristic" solution is presented. This approach has a twofold objective: on the one hand, it considers a larger number of facilities and customers within the network in order to reproduce a supply chain configuration that more closely reflects a real-world context; on the other hand, it serves to generate a starting solution and perform a series of iterations to try to improve it. Thanks to this algorithm, it was possible to obtain a solution characterised by a lower total system cost than that observed for the initial solution. The study concludes with some reflections and the description of possible future insights.

Fleet Management System for Search and Rescue Operations

Over one million people lost their lives in the last twenty years from natural disasters like wildfires, earthquakes and man-made disasters. In such scenarios the usage of a fleet of robots aims at the parallelization of the workload and thus increasing speed and capabilities to complete time sensitive missions. This work focuses on the development of a dynamic fleet management system, which consists in the management of multiple agents cooperating in order to accomplish tasks. We presented a Mixed Integer Programming problem for the management and planning of mission’s tasks. The problem was solved using both an exact and a heuristic approach. The latter is based on the idea of solving iteratively smaller instances of the complete problem. Alongside, a fast and efficient algorithm for estimation of travel times between tasks is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic approach is able to generate quality solutions, within specific time limits, compared to the exact one.

Impact of convective motions on pollutant dispersion in urban canyons: an analysis through RANS simulations

Since the majority of the population of the world lives in cities and that this number is expected to increase in the next years, one of the biggest challenges of the research is the determination of the risk deriving from high temperatures experienced in urban areas, together with improving responses to climate-related disasters, for example by introducing in the urban context vegetation or built infrastructures that can improve the air quality. In this work, we will investigate how different setups of the boundary and initial conditions set on an urban canyon generate different patterns of the dispersion of a pollutant. To do so we will exploit the low computational cost of Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations to reproduce the dynamics of an infinite array of two-dimensional square urban canyons. A pollutant is released at the street level to mimic the presence of traffic. RANS simulations are run using the k-ɛ closure model and vertical profiles of significant variables of the urban canyon, namely the velocity, the turbulent kinetic energy, and the concentration, are represented. This is done using the open-source software OpenFOAM and modifying the standard solver simpleFoam to include the concentration equation and the temperature by introducing a buoyancy term in the governing equations. The results of the simulation are validated with experimental results and products of Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) from previous works showing that the simulation is able to reproduce all the quantities under examination with satisfactory accuracy. Moreover, this comparison shows that despite LES are known to be more accurate albeit more expensive, RANS simulations represent a reliable tool if a smaller computational cost is needed. Overall, this work exploits the low computational cost of RANS simulations to produce multiple scenarios useful to evaluate how the dispersion of a pollutant changes by a modification of key variables, such as the temperature.