Fourth Meeting of the Community of Users on Safe, Secure and
Resilient Societies (focus on natural hazards, including cascading
effects)
22 June 2016, BAO Congress Centre, Brussels
Convener: Philippe Quevauviller (DG Home)
All presentations are available on the CoU website: www.securityresearch-cou.eu
Summary
The Community of Users, with the enlarged scope of Safe, Secure and Resilient Societies has held
its fourth meeting at the BAO Congress Centre in Brussels with around 130 participants. The event
was also web streamed.
The first part of the meeting focussed on presenting projects and discussing relevant issues related
to crisis management for natural hazards. The second part of the meeting concerned discussing
citizen’s involvement in crisis management and looking at ongoing network actions at national and
European level. Finally next steps have been discussed.
This report provides an overview of the presentations and discussions during the different sessions
of the Fourth CoU Meeting.
Introduction
Graham Willmott, head of unit B4 DG Home welcomed all participants. He mentioned the
extended scope of the CoU from Disaster Risk and Crisis Management to Safe, Secure and
Resilient Societies. The CoU network is important for awareness raising and dissemination, but is
also useful for other activities like proposal preparation and consortium building. Important is to
bring the results of the different projects closer to end users, including practitioners. He indicated
that discussions on the H2020 programme for 2018-2020 have already started.
Philippe Quevauviller presented the current situation concerning the CoU and the main contents
of the FP7 mapping document. It now mainly focused on relevant FP7 projects, but will be extended
with H2020 projects at a later stage. The updated version is expected to be available around
September 2016. The mapping of projects in a single working paper has already revealed the
synergy potential and possibilities to bring related projects together. The CoU is needed to create a
critical mass of involved stakeholders at all levels. There is still a significant gap between the EU
and national level, which needs to be filled per theme in order to reach the users.
Marin Ferrer Montserrat of JRC presented the status of the Disaster Risk Management
Knowledge Centre (DRMKC). The DRMKC aims to build partnerships between DRM stakeholders,
to improve use and uptake of research and knowledge, and to stimulate innovation. A bi-annual
science report will be published with inputs from over 100 authors.
Session 1: Crisis management for natural hazards – scene setting
Olimpia Imperiali of DG ECHO showed how the Union civil protection mechanism (UCPM) works
in case of an emergency, focusing on the role of the Emergency Response Coordination Centre
(ERCC). The ARISTOTLE pilot project will improve the ERCC assessment capacity with timely,
authoritative and reliable scientific advise on 24/7 basis, establishing an European natural hazard
scientific partnership.
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The implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) was presented by
Mette Lindahl Olsson of UN-ISDR. The Sendai FW is a global network, using a bottom up
approach involving all stakeholders. It uses local and national networks and has a national entry
point per country. A new element in the FW is to look at prevention of new risks. A successful
network activity is the Making Cities Resilient Campaign, which will be extended to 2020 and aims
to involve more than 5000 cities.
Philippe Quevauviller presented a short overview of the relevant H2020 research activities related
to disaster risk and crisis management, which mainly concerned the DRS calls. For these projects,
it is important to take into account the policy dimension, to build synergies with other projects, and –
above all - not to work in isolation.
A question was asked by the University of Ferrara about the interaction with national Civil
Protection authorities and/or organisations. Olimpia Imperiali of DG Echo indicated that at national
level it is investigated if assistance is needed. If that is the case a request will be made to the
ERCC and Member States (MS) can respond to this request. A next question of DELTARES
concerned the Sendai FW indicators: how can communities gain a better understanding of input
indicators? Mette Lindahl Olsson replied that work on indicators includes input, output and
voluntary indicators. Global level will be done next year and national level one year later.
Session 2: (Disaster) Crisis management
An overall presentation of the 2014-DRS-7 H2020 call projects on resilience for Critical
Infrastructure (CI) was given by Ivonne Herrera (SINTEF). These projects are DARWIN,
IMPROVER, SMR, RESILENS and RESOLUTE. The project will all contribute to European
resilience guidelines and provide methods and tools. Common activities of the projects have
already started and are planned in the next years include the organisation of joint workshops,
symposia, etc. In addition to this presentation a special information session of the five DRS-7
projects was held during the lunch break.
Dana Prochazkova of the Czech Technical University Prague presented the FOCUS project on
Disaster Management, which especially focuses on the human factor. To this end, the project
highlighted 12 deficiencies that should be overcome in Europe. In addition, tools for a safety
upgrade at EU level were indicated.
The SPARTACUS project on crisis management was presented by Clemente Fuggini
(D’Appolonia). The project focus was on location awareness. The project had the opportunity to test
the developed tools in real operations in three exercises (EU-Modex Exercise funded by DGECHO) with real end-users (National Civil Protections). This was a win-win opportunity for both the
project partners (mainly SMEs) and the end-users to raise awareness and to create the
preconditions for potential exploitation of the project results.
Olimpia Imperiali (DG Echo) stressed the importance of involving the European MS from the start
of the project, since they will be in most cases the clients buying the crisis management
“innovations” or products resulting from projects, and not the European Commission. Philippe
Quevauviller confirmed that the EC can facilitate and help to arrange for a transfer of knowledge to
the MS, but that indeed implementation will need to be done at MS level. The University of Sheffield
asked a question about the effects on infrastructure from disasters, and the difficulty to make
accurate predictions. The project leader of IMPROVER indicated that the fragility of assets was
investigated in the project.
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Session 3: Disaster risk management in the field of climate-related hazards (floods,
droughts, storms)
Daniel Sempere (UPC) presented the recently started ANYWHERE project. ANYWHERE is an
innovation action and concerns solutions for market uptake in the field of extreme weather and
climate events. Fabrizio Dominici (ISMB) presented I-REACT, which is working on applying
mobile solutions and big data in the field of extreme weather and climate events. An important
feature of I-REACT is that citizens (civil society) are central to the project, a stakeholder group that
has hitherto been underrepresented in EU projects. Both projects resulted from the 2015-DRS-1
call, and will pursue interactions to ensure proper synergies.
Rob Peters of Safety Authority Kennemerland presented the links to the Dutch Innovation Agenda
and how crisis management works in practice in the Netherlands. It is not sufficient to simply focus
on table top exercises, also real ‘in the field’ exercises are needed. In addition, cooperation with
neighbouring countries is important, especially for a small country like the Netherlands. Digital
systems can support all these activities and play a key role.
Peter Petiet of TNO presented the INTACT project which aims at risk management support on
critical infrastructure protection against extreme weather events. The project uses a six step risk
management approach and made a wiki which provides access in a user friendly way to the project
results.
DELTARES asked a question about the validation of tools. Peter Petiet replied that any
experimentation with new tools should be agreed with end users. In addition, Rob Peters indicated
the importance of de-escalation and the need for factual data to support decision making
processes. Philippe Quevauviller stressed that validation involving end users (in particular
practitioners) is increasingly being considered in research projects and plays an important role in
improving the uptake of project outputs.
Session 4: Citizen’s involvement
Georgios Kolliarakis (University of Frankfurt) presented results from the SecurePART project on
civil society engagement in security research. The role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in FP7
projects was investigated. Engaging CSOs in all kinds of security research actions as practitioners
with knowledge from the ground is advantageous for linking research with the societal context of
application. There seems to be a lag in awareness raising among other research actors and CSOs
themselves, but this should change in Horizon 2020 in order to make implementation of research
into policy more effective, acceptable, and sustainable.
The situational awareness platform of the ATHENA project was presented by Babak Akhgar
(CENTRIC). This platform enables citizens to organise themselves during a crisis. The project also
investigated lessons learned in terms of intelligence based on a number of global disasters in
recent years.
Georg Neubauer presented the Common Information Space, based on the results of a cluster of
projects on interoperability. The projects were complementary and each investigated specific
aspects. The cooperation mainly concerned the following: Ethical legal and Social Issues,
standardisation, taxonomy and dissemination activities.
Tulio Santana from Brazil presented his perspective as a citizen on the Doce River disaster in
Brazil. The disruption of the Fundão dam in the Doce River caused a flooding and at least 17
deaths. In addition, about 60 million cubic meters of iron waste flowed into the Doce River. Tulio
Santana presented some of the effects of the worst environmental disaster in Brazil on the people
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living in the Doce River basin area. If a proper emergency plan had been implemented the losses
and negative environmental impacts would have been considerably lower.
Dana Prochazkova stressed the importance of interoperability and the fact that it is more difficult to
be interoperable in actual emergency situations. Therefore, it is important to set priorities
beforehand. Rob Peters asked Tulio Santana about the anger of citizens after the crisis with the
river Doce? He indicated that while people were upset, they understood that it was
counterproductive to react with anger to the situation. To this end, civil society really banded
together to pro-actively engage and recover from the crisis, despite the personal tragedies involved.
Session 5: CoU in action – Examples of initiated networking actions at EU and national
levels
Pertti Woitsch (Geowise) presented the ResiStand project. ResiStand will contribute to an
improved disaster resilience by identifying and analysing the drivers, constraints and expectations
of three main stakeholder communities: Standardisation Organisations, End-Users, and Suppliers,
consisting of researchers, industry and SMEs. ResiStand’s partners will work with these
communities to identify standardisation gaps and to create a prioritised roadmap for new initiatives.
The roadmap will be complemented by a critical evaluation of standards as a tool to improve
disaster resilience. Additionally, ResiStand will implement a pre-standardisation process that
supports the development of standards.
Philippe Quevauviller indicated the need to establish long-run programming looking at
standardization products, including ‘soft’ instruments such as guidelines etc. Also there is a need
for more coherence between standardization activities of the different research projects.
Patricia Compard (French Ministry of Interior) asked how the setting of priorities for
standardization will be set. Pertti Woitsch replied that this will be based on the requirements of the
three communities and in close cooperation with the EC, for example DG Home. Philippe
Quevauviller added that the project has just started and this issue will be arranged with the
involved MS.
Ivonne Herrera asked about the terminology which will be used? PW mentioned that this will be
based upon existing taxonomy. A possible common vision and common activities should be further
investigated.
Aleksandar Jovanovic (EU-VRI) presented the ideas related to safety and security in the contexts
of the European Technology Platforms. He explored possibilities to align safety and security
research in Europe. An integrated risk & resilience management approach is needed to deal with
the increased complexity of problems to be handled.
Magda Stepanyan (Risk Society) presented the development of a risk management community of
practice (CoP), a project lead by the World Bank. The project has recently started and first steps
are now undertaken to build the community. Another relevant initiative to mention is the Global Risk
Platform, which has been established by the UN and is quite similar to the CoP project. Synergies
between the 2 projects are being discussed at this moment and could provide some useful lessons
for the CoU
Lisbeth Hall (RIVM) presented the EMETNET project, which aims to set up a pilot network of risk
assessors to support the EU and MS to carry out rapid risk and impacts assessments of emerging
environmental threats. An assessment can be done in 24 hours.
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Juha Rautjarvi (Miktech Ltd) presented a national Finish case study as part of the Communication
activities CoU project. The objective of this pilot study is to demonstrate how the current gap
between EU security research and national users and/or practitioners could be closed. The case
study is collaboration with Finnish partners of the TOXI-Triage project consortium (see summary of
the 3
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CoU meeting available on the CoU Website) and relevant Finnish stakeholders. The
stakeholder expectations and end user requirements will be captured and implemented using a
specific collaboration platform. The study is currently in its inception phase. The results will be
presented during the Fifth CoU meeting in October.
Ivonne Herrera asked if there were any exchanges between the security and transport
programmes, since safety and security management overlap. Philippe Quevauviller replied that
this does happen, for example in aviation security. However, such exchanges could be improved.
To this end, these kinds of CoU meetings are especially suitable for information exchange between
stakeholders from different domains, with overlapping interests. Synergy development is a key part
of that exercise. He asked the participants to provide suggestions for new thematic topics for new
CoU side meetings in the future.
Session 6: Open discussions, forum of ideas, AOB
Mark Morris (SAMUI) presented the FloodRisk2016 congress which will be organised in October
2016. A special session about science-policy-practitioners interactions will take place in the
framework of the conference, which will be followed by a CoU side-event on flood risks, for which
the CoU network will be kept informed..
Laura Birkman (Ecorys) presented an overview of the activities concerning the development of the
CoU website. She also presented the main results of the survey related to the expectations of the
CoU members with regards to the CoU website. Most CoU members are researchers and
practitioners. They would like to have one entrance to all relevant information, see the actual status
for different topics, etc. Nikki Labrum (Ecorys) provided an overview of the structure of the CoU
website. The website will be developed in different stages. The website will be available soon. All
participants are asked to visit the website and provide their feedback, so the website can be further
improved.
Conclusions and next steps
Philippe Quevauviller indicated that the next CoU meeting on CBRN-E will be held on the 10
th
October 2016 back-to-back to a major exhibition fair organised by the EDEN project (11-12
October). Participants are requested to provide ideas and contributions for the agenda. Philippe
also invited participants to send their feedback concerning this CoU meeting. Any suggestions for
further improving the CoU meetings are indeed welcome; e.g. should the meeting format be more
interactive? In 2017, a more elaborated programme will be developed for CoU side events.
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