D10: Report on HERACLES impacts at test sites

The "HERACLES main objective is to design, validate and promote responsive systems/solutions for effective resilience of CH against Climate Change effects, considering as a mandatory premise a holistic and multidisciplinary approach through the involvement of different expertise" and actors. This deliverable deals with the impacts of the HERACLES approach at the test beds. In addition to the technological impacts, this deliverable considers the social, economic and cultural ones. In particular, the methodology for evaluating the social, economic and cultural impacts has been defined in the deliverable "D10.1 Report on social impacts, societal resilience and cultural values awareness". The HERACLES modeling process takes into account the environmental characteristics of each test bed considering geomorphologic, climatic and structural site features and a large integrated sensing set of technologies, exploiting for example satellite, airborne and ground based observations, among others. An analysis of potential socio-economic impacts produced by HERACLES activities, facing the CC and natural hazards effects has been carried out specifically in the HERACLES test beds. As already discussed in the deliverable D10.1, the evaluation of the social, economic and cultural impacts of a research project is a quite big challenge. In fact, usually quantitative data are not easily available and they are observable in a long period of time. Therefore, impacts from HERACLES cannot be clearly distinguished from impacts produced by other causes. For this reason, the methodology described in the deliverable D10.1 suggests the use of an iterative process for impacts evaluation; this process implies that researchers and stakeholders discuss and influence each other with respect to a shared set of interests, objectives and tools with a collaborative approach. In particular, this process allows identifying the expected impacts during the project life and the actions for enabling a qualitative evaluation of these impacts (i.e. activities suggested to engage the different stakeholders and to establish a concrete dialogue and collaboration among them in the test beds aiming to enable a qualitative evaluation of potential impacts in the midterm, and after the end of the project). In particular, the proposed evaluation process consists of two steps: -The first step for engaging different actors in a discussion devoted to collect information on what a heterogeneous audience thinks about the opportunities and tools that HERACLES project offers to mitigate the effects connected to Climate Change impacts on the CH assets. -The second step for engaging a group of experts with the aim of predicting, before the end of the project, social, cultural and economic impacts concerning preservation of heritage. The results of the participatory workshop related to the first step of the process in Gubbio (held in June 2017) were already described in the deliverable D10.1. The same methodology has been used in Crete, where a participatory workshop was organised in October 2018. Its results are presented here, in appendix I. Taking into account of some suggestions coming from the participatory workshops, some activities have been implemented, such as for example press releases at local level on the results from HERACLES, or the organization of a competition involving the students from the upper schools of Gubbio on the importance of safeguarding CH against CC effects. The second step, involving experts from Gubbio and Crete has been organised and carried out after the implementation of these activities at the test beds. These experts were asked to answer a set of questions to build common understanding of problems and solutions that HERACLES proposes. Their opinions were collected to evaluate the HERACLES impacts.