The University of Rouen Normandie (URN) is aware that over the past few years, numerous signals (climate change, destruction of biodiversity, pollution, depletion of resources, health crises, economic crises, energy crises, social inequalities…) have been alerting us to the fact that our model of society is no longer sustainable, and wishes to develop research and disseminate it to as many people as possible in order to develop a culture of risk. To achieve this ambition, URN has created the Centre d’Expertise Scientifique sur le Multirisques (CESM). CESM focuses on cross-disciplinary, high-performance, innovative research to improve knowledge and develop tools and measures to predict, anticipate, mitigate and adapt to multi-hazards, particularly those caused by climate change. CESM is anchored in the Normandy region, particularly around the Seine axis, which is home to over 100 SEVESO-classified sites, including 58 high-risk ones. In this respect, the experts at the Normandy IPCC have demonstrated that climate change will lead to an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural hazards and risks over the coming decades (extreme precipitation, storms and flooding, river and groundwater flooding, flooding exacerbated by rising sea levels, heat waves, drought, urban heat islands, fires, landslides, differential settlement, retreating coastlines, etc.).), which in turn will lead to an acceleration in technological and industrial risks, health risks, economic and societal risks, and risks to biodiversity. Climate change must therefore be seen, through these natural hazards and risks, as a gas pedal of the relationships between risks, which we refer to as multirisks, leading to an increase in concomitances and cascade effects.
CESM aims to :
- Improve knowledge of the interactions between risks (climatic, ecological, industrial, health, economic and societal) and more specifically the cascading effects and concomitances between risks, which are currently viewed too much in silos;
- Develop a digital platform for simulating risks, their concomitance and cascade or domino effects (integrating machine learning and webmapping), with risk evolution scenarios (in particular those induced by climate change) on the Normandy territory;
- Develop territorial risk and resilience indicators based on existing indicators and their homogenization;
- Develop tools and propose measures to forecast, anticipate, mitigate and adapt to risks, in order to provide decision-support elements to local stakeholders from a multi-hazard perspective, in particular those linked to climate change;
- Develop a local culture of multi-hazard management, mitigation and adaptation to climate change and associated risks.
To discover the CESM and its contents, in particular fact sheets summarizing the results of research projects, dynamic digital cartography and downloadable datasets, simply click on the following link: https://multirisques.univ-rouen.fr/