The effects of climate change such as the increasing intensity and occurrence of natural hazards have the potential to cause severe socio-economic and environmental damage. The propagation of both the physical event and the resulting impacts, however, are not restricted to national borders. Hazardous events and their impacts can propagate across country boarders, leading to impacts of regional scale. It often requires regional collaboration and coordination from governmental authorities from neighboring countries to respond to a hazardous event, but also to design and implement measures that reduce the future risk of a region being harmed by a hazardous event. Transboundary collaboration with respect to natural hazard, risk management, environmental management and various other relevant topics is accompanied by challenges with respect to administrative, organizational, legal and cultural conditions as well as regional geographical specifics.

Geodata can provide a valuable contribution to the regional risk, disaster and environmental management. However, sometimes the data is difficult to use due to its technical complexity but very often next to the technical challenges administrative problems can be observed, e.g., specific geodata is not findable, accessible, or systematically collected as it would be required. To tackle the challenge many different activities like the Destination Earth initiative, several Digital Twin activities, etc. at EC and national level are currently investigated. They aim to enable a better understanding of interrelationships and changes and a more precise prediction of developments at different scales through visualisations, simulations, and complex analyses.

The activity focuses on transboundary regional requirements and aims to provide a building block for the preparation of a generic regional digital twin covering areas of Austria. It shall foster the opportunity to provide region-specific but also cross-country border datasets in regional data lakes that may be used by local, regional, national, European and even Global stakeholders from different sectors. The study aims to identify the different stakeholders within Austria and the neighboring countries, analyses the requirements for a regional digital twin in a generic manner and elaborates on the challenges that will be faced while implementing such a regional digital twin. In line with the objectives of the FPCUP work programme the study addresses the objectives of the Austrian Space Strategy 2030+ of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology”. In particular, the study will address Goal 4 "„Space for all areas of life".

Output and Results:

• Regional User Requirement Workshops
• Final Report containing
  • List of regional stakeholders.
  • Regional user requirements for cross-boundary natural hazards and environmental management
  • Regional data requirements
  • Regional data inventories and data gap analysis
  • Compilation of challenges for the setup of regional Digital Twins considering the regional data lake