A Quantitative Risk Assessment for fragmental rockfall

2026-07-22

Climate trends indicate that rockfall events due to global warming effects are expected to increase, underlining the urgency for accurate rockfall risk assessment. Public Administrations and private owners often face difficulties in defining risk management plans, priority of interventions and allocating resources for mitigation works. RIDETHERISK project aims at improving the knowledge and predictability of rockfall hazard and its consequences in mountain environment and open pit mines. It will develop a new physically-based method to simulate rockfall propagation accounting for rock block fragmentation and to quantify the damages in different contexts, civil and mining, to fill a knowledge gap in understanding and modelling fragmentation and its effects, increasing awareness of its destructive potential. The 3 project's objectives are: 1)enhancing rockfall hazard prediction defining analytical solutions to predict fragmentation and implementing a physical-based trajectory model for fragmental rockfall; 2)developing a fully time-integrated quantitative risk assessment method (QRA) for fragmental rockfall able to quantify social and economic damages on both viable infrastructures and open pit mine activities; 3)promoting the use of the developed QRA method, turning theory into practice, applying it in two real contexts, and realizing technical guidelines for experts, proposing their adoption to policy-makers and activity owners to properly manage the risk. The proposed method, at present missing, that quantifies the risk in terms of annual probability of death and delay/interruption time for traffic and working activities, i.e. accounting for social and economic aspects respectively, will undoubtedly help to face effectively and efficiently rockfall risk. Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication are thus fundamental. These objectives address the challenges of both the European Climate Pact and the European Action Plan on Critical Raw Materials.

Italy

2026-03-01