Fabio Cian

World Bank

Climate change projections foresee an increasing number of intense precipitation events with consequent flash and riverine floods. An accurate and rapid mapping of these phenomena is a key component of effective emergency management and disaster risk reduction plans. Earth Observation big data such as the ones acquired by the Copernicus programme,...

When floods hit inhabited areas, great losses are usually registered in terms of both impacts on people (i.e., fatalities and injuries) and economic impacts on urban areas, commercial and productive sites, infrastructures, and agriculture. To properly assess these, several parameters are needed, among which flood depth is one of the most important...

High Nature Value farmland (HNVf) are characterised by high naturalness of land cover and low intensity of agricultural practices. They are essential for biodiversity conservation in rural environments, and their presence is an important indicator of the effectiveness of different EU policies that aim to support biodiversity in agricultural areas....

The sub-Saharan African coast is experiencing fast-growing urbanization, particularly around major cities. This threatens the equilibrium of the socio-ecosystems where they are located and on which they depend: underground water resources are exploited with a disregard for sustainability; land is reclaimed from wetlands or lagoons; built-up areas,...

Analysis of climate change risks in support of policymakers to set effective adaptation policies requires an innovative yet rigorous approach towards integrated modelling (IM) of social-ecological systems (SES). Despite continuous advances, IM still faces various challenges that span through both unresolved methodological issues as well as data req...

Climate sciences foresee a future where extreme weather events could happen with increased frequency and strength, which would in turn increase risks of floods (i.e. the main source of losses in the world). The Mediterranean basin is considered a hot spot in terms of climate vulnerability and risk. The expected impacts of those events are exacerbat...

Population growth in rural areas of Egypt is rapidly transforming the landscape. New cities are appearing in desert areas while existing cities and villages within the Nile floodplain are growing and pushing agricultural areas into the desert. To enable control and planning of the urban transformation, these rapid changes need to be mapped with hig...

When floods hit inhabited areas, great losses are usually registered both in terms of impacts on people (i.e., fatalities and injuries) as well as economic impacts on urban areas, commercial and productive sites, infrastructures and agriculture. To properly assess these, several parameters are needed among which flood depth is one of the most impor...

In an era of global changes, where Earth’s biosphere is threatened by human activities, temperature rise, extreme events such as flash and riverine floods, there’s a need to monitor biodiversity, the effect of policies enforced to control human effects on land use and to understand what is at stake when a disaster occurs. With these motivations, th...

The scope of this paper is to explore the possibilities of synergy of data from Copernicus Program satellites on orbit, e.g. Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-2A, for land cover monitoring purposes. After the launch of Sentinel-1A on 3rd April 2014 and the recent launch of Sentinel-2A on past 23 th June 2015, we are able to start using both data for data fu...

Detailed Application and System Requirement Analysis for a Ka-band interferometric SAR mission.

Construction works in the city of Valencia are changing continuously the appearance of the city: new metro lines, the construction of the high speed railway lines, for the train between Madrid and Valencia, the renewal of the districts of El Grao, Cabanyal and Campanar, and some other works for the extension of the harbor area including commercial...