DRS Societal Resilience Cluster
DRS Societal Resilience Cluster
The following projects are under the Societal Resilience Cluster (SRC) in connection with the Crisis Management Innovation Network Europe (CMINE).
The collaboration of the nine projects within the SRC includes the exchange of best practices, sharing of the obtained results, interaction concerning the applied methodologies, joint participation in crucial events and workshops concerning the topics of disaster resilient societies, and the joined production of policy outputs. More information about the cluster can be found in the SRC factsheet or in the following introduction video.
Read the first SRC Policy Brief
The recommendations are grounded in an all-ofsociety approach, aimed at strengthening societal inclusion in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). This
entails broad-based participation in disaster risk management through engagement with different stakeholders including formal authorities and
response organizations, businesses and private actors, and volunteers and citizens, including those which are marginalized and most vulnerable. Hence, the recommendations contribute directly to the achievement of the goals and outcomes within the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction around building resilient communities as well as the
European Union’s Disaster Resilience Goals and Climate Adaptation Strategy towards increasing preparedness and enhancing a culture of risk
prevention amongst the population.
The document is based on the outcomes from 9 Research and Innovation projects as part of the Societal Resilience Cluster, an initiative supported by the Crisis Management Innovation Network Europe. The recommendations in this document are the result of co-production processes involving experts, scientists, practitioners, and decisionmakers from over 100 organizations. All of the projects involved have received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes for Disaster Resilient Societies (DRS).
Download the full Policy Brief
BuildERS works on increasing the social resilience capital of European communities, and citizens. It will do this by genuinely co-designing processes and tools with citizens, first-responder organisations, and tool developers. The project will incorporate an inclusive and interactive research and analysis process, where the results are not derived ‘top-down’ but through a ‘bottom-top’ dynamic interaction.
CORE (sCience & human factOr for Resilient sociEty) is a multi-disciplinary consortium established to understand how to define common metrics with respect to the different natural and man-made disaster scenarios, and how to measure, control and mitigate the impact on the populations, particularly on vulnerable groups: disabled, elderly, poor, as well as women and children. It contributes to Horizon 2020’s focus on secure societies where citizens are facing increasingly threatening situations. Recent natural and manmade disasters have shown gaps in the level of preparedness of European society for disasters, highlighting the importance of increasing risk awareness, which ensures a direct positive impact on citizen and organisational resilience among people and decision-makers in Europe. CORE will identify and use best practice and knowledge/learning from certain countries, such as Japan which experienced high levels of seismic, volcanic and tsunami risks but where risk awareness is high. It will provide optimized actions and solutions to help restructure and rebuild socio-economic structures after a disaster, across and outside Europe (Israel, India & Japan), where it will have access, through the end-users, to the relevant base of knowledge. CORE will lead to more efficient and effective policies, governance structures and broad awareness and collaboration among citizens, as well as between citizens and rescue agencies. Best practice and best procedures will be identified and reported to policymakers, end-users and disseminated to all stakeholders and NGOs. CORE will devote great attention to education in schools, making the young generation a sort of “prevention sentinels”.
In actual times, climate change and evolving global assets are changing the nature of hazards and their predictability. Societies and all individuals are demanded to be able to rapidly respond to growing natural and man-made disasters. ENGAGE is an EU-funded project, started in July 2020, whose mission is to provide novel knowledge, impactful solutions and emergency response guidelines for exploiting Europe ́s societal resilience. Solutions will aim at bridging the gap between formal and informal approaches to risk and emergency management, increasing the ability of communities to adapt before, during and after disaster.
The actual global scenario is increasingly exposing the human society to higher hazards, requiring that all individuals specifically and the civil society at large, acquire the ability to rapidly respond to natural disaster and to man-made risks. Risk awareness is indeed a strong priority for modern societies and social resilience is necessary to enhance successful responses to unexpected emergencies.
In the actual strategies there is a gap between the formal effort of public authorities to protect citizens from harm and the voluntary support provided by citizens during emergencies. Starting from this awareness ENGAGE addresses the whole society and tries to bridge the different ways of intervention to make communities more skilled in responding to disasters jointly and therefore more resilient. The project will analyze past natural emergencies, terrorist attacks, and man-made disasters to understand how citizens supported formal intervention practices during emergencies under specific contextual conditions.
Together with real practitioners from their Knowledge and Innovation Community of Practice (KI-CoP), ENGAGE proposes emergency response strategies to bring the population closer to rescuers and authorities, bridging the gap between formal and informal guidelines in specific contexts.
LINKS “Strengthening links between technologies and society for European disaster resilience” is a comprehensive study on disaster governance in Europe. The overall aim of the LINKS project is to strengthen links between technologies and society for improved European disaster resilience, by producing sustainable advanced learning on the use of social media and crowdsourcing (SMCS) in disasters. In recent years, social media and crowdsourcing (SMCS) have been integrated into crisis management for improved information gathering and collaboration across European communities. The effectiveness of SMCS on European disaster resilience, however, remains unclear owing to the diversity among disaster risk perception and vulnerability (DRPV), disaster management processes (DMP) and disaster community technologies (DCT) across Europe today. From this point of departure, LINKS sets out to achieve four core objectives:
- Produce sustainabile advanced learning on SMCS in disasters
- Achieve a consolidated understanding of SMCS in disasters
- Govern the diversity of SMCS in disasters
- Bring multidisciplinary SMCS stakeholders together
This project will develop a decision-support system (DSS) for disaster risk management by considering multiple interacting natural hazards and cascading impacts using a novel resilient-informed and service-oriented approach that accounts for forecasted modifications in the hazard (e.g., climate change), vulnerability/resilience (e.g., aging structures and populations) and exposure (e.g., population decrease/increase). The primary deliverable from MEDiate will be a decision support framework in the form of serviceorientated web tool and accompanying disaster risk management framework providing end users (local authorities, businesses etc) with the ability to build accurate scenarios to model the potential impact of their mitigation and adaptation risk management actions.
The scenarios, which can be customised to reflect local conditions and needs (e.g., demographics, deprivation, natural resources etc), will be based on a combination of the historical record and future climate change projections to forecast the location and intensity of climate related disaster events and to predict their impacts, including cascading impacts, on the vulnerability of the local physical, economic and social systems. The scenarios will allow end users to evaluate the potential impact of different risk management strategies to reduce vulnerability and enhance community resilience. The project will consist of analysis of relevant data and codevelopment with testbed decision-makers of a DSS to enable more reliable resilience assessments, accounting for risk mitigation and adaptive capabilities, to be made, therefore reducing losses (human, financial, environmental etc) from future climate-related and geophysical disasters. The project will involve a multi-disciplinary team of geophysical and meteorological scientists, risk engineers, social scientists, information technologists and end-users, working together to ensure that the system is user-led and supported by appropriate technology.
The PARATUS project aims at increasing the preparedness of first and second responders in the face of multi-hazard events and to reduce the risks related to impacts on various sectors that result from complex disasters. The outcome is to develop a cloud-based Online Service Platform that offers support in reducing dynamic risk scenarios and systemic vulnerability caused by multi-hazard disasters. In order to achieve these objectives, the project will perform in-depth assessments of complex interactions between hazards and their resulting impacts in various sectors, as well as analyse the current risk situation and study how alternative future scenarios could change multi-hazard impact chains. Based on this analysis, scenarios of multi-hazard impacts will be co-designed with stakeholders and developed in four case study areas (including the Caribbean, Romania, Istanbul, and Alpine areas)
RESILOC
The overall goal of RESILOC is to identify new strategies for improving on the processes of preparedness of local communities against any kind of hazards, either planned or unplanned. The project aims at bringing together the validity and experience of local communities and the strategies and commitment of national and supra-national actors to achieve a tangible impact on the way resilience is understood and increased in local communities. Therefore a holistic framework of studies, methods and software instruments will be developed, that combines the physical with the less tangible aspects associated with human behavior that applies at the community scale.