The Doctoral School HADRIAN aims to advance the process understanding of hazards in alpine regions such as droughts, storms, heavy precipitation events, floods, landslides, torrents, avalanches, and their cascading effects (multi-hazards), as well as related risks and impacts for socio-economic systems.

HADRIAN focuses on climate and meteorological processes and land use as changing boundary conditions, catchment hydrology, geological and geomorphological processes, as well as physio-geographic constraints as important predisposing conditions and hazard triggers.

HADRIAN aims to synthesize long-term observation and monitoring, data analysis and modelling, to foster an improved system and process understanding. These are essential requirements to unravel and predict future adverse impacts and develop sustainable mitigation and adaptation strategies. In this context, the natural and human interactions and the system's respective societal drivers will be explored. This is a crucial precondition for system change and resilient solutions. 

The three main research questions of HADRIAN are:

  1. How will natural hazards in alpine regions evolve under global change?
  2. How will the impacts of hazards change with changing socio-economic systems?
  3. How can the process understanding, observation, and forecasting skills be improved to increase warning capacities and foster mitigation and adaptation? 

  

On a national level, HADRIAN contributes to the scientific pillar of the inter- and transdisciplinary Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA), a network founded by Austrian universities to facilitate scientific knowledge transfer into effective risk and disaster management.