Demonstration overview
The Swiss pilot site is uniquely structured around two contrasting cantons—Zürich and Ticino—offering a valuable opportunity for exploring multi-hazard early warning systems in both urban and mountainous rural settings.
The Canton of Zurich is densely populated, hosting 1.6 million people in a relatively flat, urban environment. It serves as Switzerland’s largest economic hub.
The Canton of Ticino, by contrast, is home to just 350,000 residents scattered across steep Alpine terrain, creating specific vulnerabilities such as landslides and avalanches.
Hazards faced
Zürich:
Ticino:
Related partners
Solution
Switzerland already uses a mature national multi-hazard information platform known as GIN, developed by federal institutions and currently used by first responders and registered organizations. The GOBEYOND project brings added value to the GOBEYOND Multi-Risk Impact-based Early Warning System (MR-IEWS) and the GIN platform by:
- Assessing the added value of user-tailored hazard information that more closely aligns with the operational workflows, decision-making processes, and situational awareness needs of different stakeholder groups.
- Exploring the integration of exposure and risk information relevant to diverse stakeholders by combining national and local risk maps, critical infrastructure datasets, population and land-cover statistics, and historical emergency records.
- Evaluating the feasibility and limitations of providing user-specific impact predictions, grounded in empirical impact analyses and advanced modelling outputs, to support operational decision-making.
- Enhancing hazard detail for selected high-impact processes, particularly flash floods and surface runoff in the Canton of Ticino, through retrospective event analysis using hydrodynamic modelling approaches and the Flash Flood Model REAFFIRM/ERICHA developed by UPC-CRAHI.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme for research and innovation under grant agreement No. 101121135.