Alberto Pistocchi was born in 1972 in Cesena, Italy; he is a senior researcher and a senior civil and environmental engineer (chartered in 1998). His current professional and scientific interests include:

1. Modelling of floods, droughts and geohydrological hazards
2. Effects of climate and land use change on natural hazards
3. Land planning with emphasis on sustainable land management and the mitigation of impacts from land use change
4. Adaptation to climate change
5. Spatial multimedia modelling of chemical pollution and subsequent human and ecological risk assessment.

He is a  project consultant to EURAC Research, Bolzano, Italy, since February 2010, as an expert in natural hazard analysis and hydrology.

He is non-tenured professor of Environmental Assessment at the University of Trento, Italy, in the Academic years 2010-2011 and 2011-2012.

Alberto Pistocchi has a MSc in Philosophy (“Laurea in Filosofia”) cum laude (2002) and a MSc in Environmental Engineering and Land Planning (“Laurea in Ingegneria per l’Ambiente e il Territorio”) cum laude (1997) from the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy. He received a PhD in Georesources management and geotechnologies (“Georisorse e geotecnologie”) from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bologna, Italy, in april 2001, with a thesis on planning theory presenting a critical discussion of the role of geo-environmental models in the structuring  of land planning processes, and the compatible forms of models used in spatial decision support systems; the discussion grounded on a number of case studies where quantitative or qualitative models were used for specific land planning problems.  Each of the case studies was separately published in peer reviewed scientific journals, at conferences or in technical journals. The thesis (in Italian) is available for download(http://amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it/12/1/Alberto_Pistocchi_2001.pdf ).
He has been working for four years (june 2000 - august 2004) as a project manager and scientific-technical officer (hydraulic engineer and land planner) with the Regione Emilia Romagna government (Forlì, Italy), where he was responsible for the development of studies, analyses and river basin master plans for the management of flood and landslide risk, land subsidence, coastal erosion, droughts, water resources and riverine ecosystem management.  Particularly, he led the development of the title II of the “Piano stralcio per il rischio idrogeologico” (geo-hydrological risk management plan - 2001) according to Law 365/2000, and its update later adopted by the Regione Emilia Romagna in 2008. This plan was already in line with the more recent European flood directive 60/2007/EC. In this context, he led the development of a directive issued by the Romagna river basin authority, yielding legally binding criteria and methods to be adopted for the estimation of design flood discharges and river system analysis boundary conditions, the mitigation of soil sealing effects on floods, and the evaluation of residual risks from river levees in plain areas.
He was also involved as the representative of the regional river basin authority in developing the river basin management plan (Piano di tutela delle acque) according to Legislative Decree n. 152/1999, which was introducing principles and methods later generalized with the Water Framework Directive 60/2000/EC, and in the regional Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) process, with emphasis on soil protection, coastal erosion and land subsidence. The plans, programmes, directives, datasets and analyses developed in those projects can be accessed from the sites http://www.regione.emilia-romagna.it/baciniromagnoli and http://baciniromagnoli.dapt.unibo.it/index.htm.
He has been working since 1998 as an independent consultant part-time, in the field of hydraulic engineering, land planning and environmental assessment (environmental impact assessment - EIA, strategic environmental assessment – SEA, and similar procedures). In 2001 he has been founding an engineering and consulting firm, GECOsistema s.r.l.(www.gecosistema.eu ), as an innovative PhD research spin-off (spatial decision support systems through advanced geographic information systems (GIS) and environmental modelling techniques), within the regional programme Spinner (www.spinner.it). The company was selected as a participant of the European project on innovative start - ups SUN&SUP (“start - up network, start - up provider”) during 2002-2005.
From September 2004 till January 2010, he served the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Ispra as a project manager and scientific officer. His research activity was about the development and application of continental scale, spatially explicit models of chemical fate and transport in Europe, yielding the development of “MAPPE”, a GIS-based model predicting environmental concentrations of contaminants in different media (air, soil, water, sediments) for continental Europe.  He has been particularly working on the fate of persistent organic pollutants, pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Information on this line of research is available at the web site: http://fate.jrc.ec.europa.eu/. In particular, he acted as workpackage leader in the European FP7 integrated project NoMiracle http://nomiracle.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ (2004 - 2009), as a task leader in collaborative projects between the European Commission DG ENV and JRC on the assessment of priority pollutants of European concern, and as an expert in the EUROSTAT working group on pesticide statistics (indicators of pesticide risks) and the model analysis of results of Europe-wide monitoring campaigns on emerging water pollutants.  He also supported the working group on the development of “Guidelines for Application of Common Criteria to Identify Agricultural Areas with Natural Handicaps” with continental scale models of soil water balance, that were used for the assessment of aridity and drainage limitations. He is author of several publications (download the list).