World Heritage (WH) properties and heritage sites in general are exposed to the impacts of natural and man-triggered catastrophic events, which threaten their integrity and may compromise their value. The loss or deterioration of these outstanding properties has severely negative impacts on local and national communities, both because of their cultural importance, and because of their socio-economic value (https://whc.unesco.org/en/disaster-risk-reduction/). In the framework of the H2020-ARCH project a simplified approach was implemented for assessing and monitoring the subsidence hazards and the possible induced damages and short- and long-term impacts that these might cause on the buildings and other structures composing and characterising the WH sites. The InSAR data sets relating to the WH area of the Hamburg city were processed to evaluate the deformation velocity affecting each building, in order to project the Subsidence Related Intensity parameters in the short-and long-term, and thus estimate the expected damage levels through fragility curves. The results show a relatively stable situation in the area, however damage levels of a certain consistency are detectable for a long period due to the differential settlements. Furthermore, the results obtained allow us to evaluate the socio-economic impacts on the basis of some assumptions about potential losses.

Heatwaves, have been made more frequent and intense in the last decades due to climate change and have been severely impacting the population, especially vulnerable ones, causing illness, death and impact on productivity. Heatwaves and their consequences are worst in urban areas that become islands of higher temperatures, usually refereed to as urban heat islands, UHI. In the framework of the European Commission-funded research project ARCH: Advancing Resilience of historic areas against Climate-related and other Hazards this phenomenon has been analyzed with special focus on historic and cultural heritage areas. This paper proposes an easy to be implemented procedure to provide to local administrations and stakeholders readable and easy to be understood information on the location of UHI within the territory and the induced risks of impact on the population, enabling them to take informed decisions on possible and effective mitigation strategies. The proposed procedures use satellite thermal maps to quantify the thermal hazard within the analysed territory in the first instance; the exposure to UHI effect in terms of location and severity of possible urban islands within the city is evaluated by considering both the land cover and the population. A social vulnerability assessment is then performed based on age and economic indicators readily available from census data. Using a fuzzy overlay approach all the above-mentioned assessments are combined to estimate the risk for possible impacts to the population induced by heatwaves.

An essential step in earthquake risk assessment consists in collecting information regarding buildings at risks in order to evaluate their vulnerability, and, ultimately, their expected damages for events of specific intensity. A number of building features can be retrieved by means of remote sensing, either directly (through direct observations of features such as their size or footprints) or indirectly (by appraising the expected building types, given features such as the shape of roads or roofs, and an a-priori knowledge of the urban landscape of interest). Here, we evaluate to which extent the accuracy of mean damage grade can be improved by means of remote sensing using the RISK-EU (2004) [1] assessment grid. The results show that if nothing is known regarding the building stocks in the city of interest, the uncertainty in average vulnerability can be reduced by half using remote sensing observations if adequate indirect proxies can be found.