The Institute of Environmental Geology and Geoengineering of the Italian National Research Council was established in 2001 from the merging of five former institutes and centres with expertise in different fields of earth sciences, geotechnical end mining engineering and environmental chemistry. The Institute's mission is to study and understand geological natural processes and human practices interacting with and influencing the human environment, activities, and life.
Strategic research topics are:
- Earth's past and recent-ongoing evolution as a key to envisage and plan the sustainable development of the human environment
- natural and anthropic hazards
- natural resources
- global and local environmental changes
- man-environment interactions
The Institute operates in both fundamental and applied research, facing topics of environmental interest with social fallout, developing different research lines:
- Geological processes for the knowledge and mitigation of natural hazards and for the assessment and exploitation of natural resources
- Geomorphological evolution of continental margins and adjoining marine areas for the mitigation of geological hazards
- Soil and fluid geochemistry for environmental assessments
- Exploitation and promotion of geological raw materials and safety of disused mining areas
- Site remediation and recovery technologies of industrial waste
- Development and application of new technologies related to in situ monitoring of natural or excavated walls and geo-structural and geo-mechanical characterization of rocks
- Geotechnical analysis of deformation and rupture cases in soils and rocks originating from both geological and anthropic processes