as analyses of climate change impacts suggest that there is no immediate need to undertake practical adaptation measures with regard to hydropower bmlfuw projects focus on understanding climate change impacts except for a few practical measures aimed at introducing district cooling from biomass or wastetoenergy plans which would also have a positive impact on climate change mitigation the conclusions of the oecd still hold true many hazards which have strong linkages to climate change actually have relatively low medium economic significance the clearest impact of climate change on natural hazards involve glacial and permafrost areas which may be of limited economic significance from a national perspective although the implications for local communities may be quite significant on the other hand hazards which have considerably higher economic and social significance such as floods and windstorms have more complex and less certain linkages with climate change despite the uncertainty of climate change impacts on flooding and winter storms the related risk should be taken seriously given the impact of such events and the growing vulnerability to them on the part of alpine societies because of demographic land use and other pressures