IMPROVER

The overall objective of IMPROVER is to improve European critical infrastructure resilience to crises and disasters through the implementation of resilience concepts to real life examples of pan-European significance, including cross-border examples.

The improvement will arise through the development of a methodology for implementing combinations of societal, organisational and technological resilience concepts to critical infrastructure based on risk evaluation techniques and informed by a review of the positive impact of different resilience concepts on critical infrastructure.

IMPROVER is aimed at developing European Resilience Management Guideline and demonstrating it through pilot implementation.

RESILENS

RESILENS will develop a European Resilience Management Guideline (ERMG) to support the practical application of resilience to all CI sectors. Accompanying the ERMG will be a Resilience Management Matrix and Audit Toolkit which will enable a resilience score to be attached to an individual CI, organisation (e.g. CI provider) and at different spatial scales (urban, regional, national and transboundary) which can then be iteratively used to direct users to resilience measures that will increase their benchmarked future score. Other resilience methods including substitution processes and measures to tackle cascading effects will also be developed.

RESISTAND

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. To test the feasibility of this process and encourage the continued use of the “ResiStand Process”, ResiStand will develop a new work item. The overall objective of ResiStand is to identify new ways to improve the crisis management and disaster resilience capabilities of the European Union and of individual Member States through standards.

RESOLUTE

RESOLUTE is based on the vision of achieving higher sustainability of operations in European Urban Transport System (UTS). The project recognises foremost the ongoing profound transformation of urban environments in view of ecological, human and overall safety and security needs, as well as the growing importance of mobility within every human activity. Sustainability is rapidly becoming an imperative need across all economic and social domains. Among many things, this requires overall heightened operational efficiency, mainly by optimising the allocation and utilisation of available resources (organisational technical and human), whilst striving to continuously minimise any source of waste, namely incidents, accidents and other  operational failures.

Within this context, RESOLUTE considers resilience as a useful management paradigm, within which adaptability capacities are considered paramount. Rather than targeting continuous economic and financial growth of businesses and market shares, organisations must generate the ability to continuously adjust to ever-changing operational environments.

WEATHER

The assessment of weather-related impacts requires two steps: the recording of damages and the application of an economic evaluation framework on this quantitative dataset. Further, the issue of generalisation of country- or event-specific findings to larger geographical entities is of particular interest when trying to grasp the size of the problem.

For each of the four modes (road, rail, waterborne and air) the following categories of damages are considered:

  1. Infrastructure damages and impacts on infrastructure maintenance, wear and tear and operations, e.g. snow removal, cleaning, small-scale repair measures, etc.

  2. Vehicle fleet damages and impacts on the costs of service provision, e.g. additional personnel, energy costs or vehicle preparation.

  3. User travel time costs, including time for freight movements, and perceived service quality, e.g. reliability, crowding and temperatures in vehicles.

  4. Traffic safety, i.e. the number killed, severely and slightly injured transport users.

RESIN: H2020 funded under DRS9

In the Resin project risk is defined as the probability of occurrence of a disturbance which results from the combination of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Thanks to adaptation to climate change (ACC) and disaster risk reduction (DRR), exposure is reduced and risks are recognized and assessed, and then resilience is built to compensate or avoid them. Within RESIN, ACC depicts actions implementation in order to withstand climate change impacts and ensure the same infrastructures’ performance level. This should allow critical infrastructures to continue to function during a disturbance or quickly recover to its original services, increasing infrastructures and all interrelated city components’ resilience (CI, buildings, public spaces etc.). Disaster Risk Reduction is defined as the concept and practice of reducing disaster risks through systematic efforts to analyze and reduce the causal factors of disasters. Reducing exposure to hazards, lessening vulnerability of people and property, wise management of land and the environment, and improving preparedness and early warning for adverse events are all examples of disaster risk reduction.

PLACARD: H2020 funded under DRS9

PLACARD’s (PLAtform for Climate Adaptation and Risk reDuction) mission is to be the recognised platform for dialogue, knowledge exchange and collaboration between the Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) communities. In the large and complex landscape of stakeholder networks, research, policy initiatives and information sources, the PLACARD hub will enhance the coherence of and give direction to CCA and DRR research, policy and practices, strengthening cooperation and countering fragmentation between the domains.

The programme will establish a comprehensive coordination and knowledge exchange platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue and consultation to address gaps and fragmentation challenges, and support the development and implementation of an evidence base for research and innovation policies.

CIPRNet: Critical Infrastructure Preparedness and Resilience Research Network

The Critical Infrastructure Preparedness and Resilience Research Network or CIPRNet establishes a Network of Excellence in Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). CIPRNet performs research and development that addresses a wide range of stakeholders including (multi)national emergency management, critical infrastructure operators, policy makers, and the society. By integrating resources of the CIPRNet partners acquired in more than 60 EU co-funded research projects, CIPRNet will create new advanced capabilities for its stakeholders. A key technology for the new capabilities will be modelling, simulation and analysis for CIP. CIPRNet builds a long-lasting virtual centre of shared and integrated knowledge and expertise in CIP. This virtual centre shall provide durable support from research to end users. It will form the foundation for the European Infrastructures Simulation & Analysis Centre (EISAC) by 2020.

DRIVER: Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience

DRIVER addresses the needs for European crisis management identified by previous EU-funded projects like ACRIMAS and CRYSIS. DRIVER seeks to achieve step-wise innovation that is based on the systematic assessment and iterative adaptation of research results to operational requirements in three main thematic strands: civil society resilience, professional response (Command & Control) and evolved learning. In this context DRIVER’s overall mission is to improve crisis management through more systematic testing and assessment of novel crisis management solutions, thereby creating more rational grounds for their operational uptake or otherwise. By thus improving the interaction between users and solutions providers DRIVER aims at strengthening the European CM innovation eco-system.

FRC: Flood Resilience City

FRC is about developing urban areas that are able to be resilient to changes that would otherwise cause an increasing likelihood of flooding. But although the examples we give are related to flooding, the approaches that we have used are also relevant to managing changing risks within many aspects of the built, natural, water and social environments. FRC is not just for water engineers and flood managers. It sets out to introduce flooding and flood management to anyone who needs to know about it, either because they are personally affected by flooding or because it affects their job or the decisions that they have to make. It’s also for people who have interests in other aspects of water management such as for supporting ecosystems. To achieve this we use plain language and a straightforward framework developed with partners in related projects to guide you to the topics that you are, or need to be interested in.

INFRARISK: Novel indicators for identifying critical INFRAstructure at RISK from Natural Hazards

INFRARISK is developing a reliable stress test framework to establish the resilience of European Critical Infrastructure to rare, low frequency, extreme natural hazard events and to aid decision making in the long term regarding robust infrastructure development and the protection of existing infrastructure. In an integrated approach to hazard assessment, the project is focusing on the impacts of seismic, landslide and flooding hazards on road and rail transport infrastructure, considering the interdependencies of the networks, cascading hazards and cascading effects and spatial and temporal vulnerability.

INTACT: Impact of extreme weather on critical infrastructure

Resilience of Critical Infrastructure (CI) to Extreme Weather Events (EWE) is one of the most demanding challenges for both government and society. CI are especially sensitive to EWE. The economic and societal relevance of the dependability and resilience of CI is obvious: infrastructure malfunctioning and outages can have far reaching consequences and impacts. The increased frequency and intensity of EW can cause events such as flooding, drought, ice formation, wild fires etc. which present a range of complex challenges to the operational resilience of CI.

RAIN: Risk Analysis of Infrastructure Networks in response to extreme weather

RAIN will quantify the complex interactions between weather events and land based infrastructure systems. The output of RAIN will aid decision making in the long term, securing new robust infrastructure development and protection of existing infrastructure against climate change and increasingly more unpredictable weather patterns. Transport, energy and telecommunications infrastructure will be considered and risk mitigation strategies will be developed. This will be achieved through developing an operational analysis framework which considers the impact of individual hazards on specific infrastructure systems and the coupled interdependencies of critical infrastructure through robust risk and uncertainty modelling.

REAKT: Strategies and Tools for Real Time Earthquake Risk Reduction

The general objective of REAKT is to improve the efficiency of real time earthquake risk mitigation methods and its capability of protecting structures, infrastructures and people. REAKT aims at establishing the best practice on how to use jointly all the information coming from earthquake forecast, early warning and real time vulnerability assessment. All this information needs to be combined in a fully probabilistic framework, including realistic uncertainties estimations, to be used for decision making in real time.

PREDICT: PREparing for the Domino effect In Crisis siTuations

The aim of the PREDICT project is to provide a comprehensive solution for dealing with cascading effects in multi-sectoral crisis situations covering aspects of critical infrastructures. The PREDICT solution will be composed of the following three pillars: methodologies, models and software tools. Their integrated use will increase the awareness and understanding of cascading effects by crisis response organisations, enhances their preparedness and improves their response capability to respond in case of cascading failures.

Snowball

The forces behind modernization – social, economic, technological, administrative – have boosted the wealth of modern society to unprecedented levels, but at the same time they have made us more vulnerable to disruptions and threats. Increasingly complex and tightly coupled systems deliver efficiency and security, but also the potential for disaster if those systems fail. Moreover, in the happening of a catastrophic event, the dynamics of human behavior play a central role. Irrational behaviors such as panic and confusion are likely to take control of human activities. The Cascading Effects are those which are at play in a «System of Systems». In this context of hyper-connected societies – where networks of all sorts are intertwined – with population densities growing everyday, it is necessary to better understand the cascading effects at play in a crisis.

STAR-FLOOD: STrengthening And Redesigning European FLOOD risk practices: Towards appropriate and resilient flood risk governance arrangements

STAR-FLOOD project is focused on analysing, explaining, evaluating and designing policies to better deal with flood risks from rivers in urban agglomerations across Europe. The results of this ambitious project are expected to be highly relevant for policies and law at the European, national and regional level and for the development of public-private partnerships.

Strest: Harmonized approach to stress tests for critical infrastructures against natural hazards

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) provide essential goods and services for modern society; they are highly integrated and have growing mutual dependencies. Recent natural events have shown that cascading failures of CIs have the potential for multi-infrastructure collapse and widespread societal and economic consequences. Moving toward a safer and more resilient society requires improved and standardized tools for hazard and risk assessment of low probability-high consequence (LP-HC) events, and their systematic application to whole classes of CIs, targeting integrated risk mitigation strategies. Among the most important assessment tools are the stress tests, designed to test the vulnerability and resilience of individual CIs and infrastructure systems. Following the results of the stress tests recently performed by the EC for the European Nuclear Power Plants, it is urgent to carry out appropriate stress tests for all other classes of CIs.

TRAP: Territories of Rivers Action Plans

The Territories of Rivers Action Plans (TRAP) project is about bringing together river basin & landscape protection, with regional growth models and solutions. This is called ‘integrated river & river territory development’. While the protection of rivers basins & river territories is not negotiable, the costs associated with it must be explicitly balanced by income through growth and rationalised by suitable development actions. The protection element of the TRAP project deals with the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the European Landscape Convention (ELC). The WFD benchmark is for partners’ water basins to ensure ‘good water status’ by 2015 (EC deadline). The ELC benchmark is protecting the physical, cultural, historical and built landscape by valuing it in local development and land use provisions, a demanding objective especially in circumstances of critical economic situations or economic land use pressures.

EUSTO: European Surface Transport Operators Forum

EUSTO proposal originates from the real-world necessity to provide comprehensive and consolidated protection to surface transportation protection networks. In accordance to EU regulations, the responsibility for implementing protection programmes lays with the CI operator and national authorities, and ongoing efforts for the identification and designation of major European CI in the transportaion sector have been lacking progress in recent years. This proposal originates from this drawback in the implementation of the CIPS directive in the EU and aspires to make a small but vital contribution for its implementation.