



DIRECTED is presenting at EGU 2023 in Vienna
The DIRECTED team is going to introduce our project at the EGU 2023 in natural hazard session NH9.17 – Innovations for multi-sectoral impact assessment, risk modelling and management of natural hazards at The General Assembly 2023 of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) is taking place in Vienna, Austria and online, April 23–28, 2023. The annual EGU General Assembly is the largest and most prominent European geosciences event, attracting over 14,000 scientists from all over the world in the year 2022.


DIRECTED at Tag der Hydrology 2023 in Bochum
The DIRECTED team is going to introduce our project in session 5 of The Day of Hydrology – Tag der Hydrologie TDH 2023 taking place from March 21–23, 2023 at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. TDH 2023 focuses on “Sustainable Water Management – Regional and Global Strategies” and is hosted by the Chair of Engineering Hydrology and Water Resources Management of the Ruhr-University Bochum and the Department of Hydraulic Engineering and Hydromechanics of the Bochum University of Applied Sciences.


Directed Project Launch
New Horizon Europe Project set to improve climate disaster risk management across multiple civil authorities and first responders in Europe.
Summary points:
- €5.2 Million Horizon Europe Project (DIRECTED) aims to improve the interoperability of multiple European climate risk assessment and planning tools and bring them together in a manageable system (a data fabric) that enables better disaster risk assessment and management by European disaster protection authorities and first responders
- Using ‘Real World Labs’ to critically analyse and improve current work-flows and governance linked to disaster risk management
Details:
A new €5.2 Million Horizon Europe Project, ‘Disaster Resilience for Extreme Climate Events providing Interoperable Data, Models, Communication and Governance (DIRECTED) Project’ was launched on the 29th& 30th November in Braunschweig, Germany and is set to revolutionize the governance and management of climate disasters across multiple civil society and emergency agencies. Physical, social and data scientists are coming together from across Europe with local authorities and first responders to design a new integrated system (a data fabric) that will bring together multiple climate risk assessment tools, disaster warning systems and disaster communication and organisation into one manageable system for use by on-the-ground disaster managers.
Four regional and municipal clusters from the Capital Region of Denmark, the Danube Region, Emilia Romagna Region, Italy and the Rhine-Erft District, Germany are coming together with academic researchers and specialist SME’s from the Technical University of Braunschweig, ETH Zurich, Danish Technical University, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, German Research Centre of GeoScience, University College Cork, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Stockholm Environment Institute, 52 North Spatial Information Research, GECOSistema, Genillard & Co and Oasis Hub to participate in ‘Real World Labs’ analysing on-the-ground practices, governance and systems of multiple disaster practitioners involved in climate disaster planning and disaster management.
The collaboration is a rare opportunity to share disaster risk management practices and problems to enable more efficiencies across disaster protection networks to improve information flow and ability to respond to climate disaster events by providing tailored information to the many agencies involved in large scale disasters and disaster planning.
As well as designing the data fabric, the group will look at how to make multiple climate disaster assessment & planning tools ‘interoperable’ with each other, thus further enabling their functionality to enhance climate disaster risk assessment and on the ground planning and preparedness.
In addition, social scientists will be drawing out how multiple agencies involved in preparing for any major climate emergency can better improve their joint working and understand the disaster authorities and first responders needs for relevant data to manage complex climate disaster risk assessment and resilience planning. The collaboration will also look at how work silos from the many different levels of administration can better work together for more efficient disaster management in the future.
Max Steinhausen, Project Coordinator for the DIRECTED Project states ‘we envisage the impacts that we will have building and combining information on climate extremes and adaptation to climate change will ultimatelygreatly reduce the damages and losses that face the European community in the future.’
About this Project:
[This project is an Innovation Action under the Civil Security for Society, Disaster-Resilient Societies programme of the Horizon Europe funded by the European Union. Project details and a full list of participant organisations can be found on the link: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101073978 . Associate partners SEI Oxford and Oasis Hub are funded by Innovate UK and ETH Zurich is funded by The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), Switzerland]
Contacts:
Project Co-ordinator: Max Steinhausen
Technische Universitaet Braunschweig
Max.steinhausen@tu-braunschweig.de
Project Communications Lead: Tracy Irvine
Oasis Hub Ltd
tracy.irvine@oasishub.io
What: DIRECTED Project Launch
Where: Braunschweig, Germany
When: 29th & 30th November, 2022
About
Directed
We aim to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events and foster disaster-resilient European societies by promoting interoperability of data, models, communication and governance on all levels and between all actors of the disaster risk management and climate adaptation process.
Project Mission
Directed promotes multi-risk thinking in interdisciplinary research to overcome silos and enable interoperability.
read more »Real World Labs
Four Real World Labs in Europe are at the center of our
co-development approach.
About Us
Directed, a project set to improve climate disaster risk management across multiple civil authorities and first responders in Europe.
read more »News

DIRECTED at Tag der Hydrology 2023 in Bochum
The DIRECTED team is going to introduce our project in session 5 of The Day of Hydrology – Tag der Hydrologie TDH 2023 taking place from March 21–23, 2023 at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. TDH 2023 focuses on “Sustainable Water Management – Regional and Global Strategies” and is hosted by the Chair of Engineering Hydrology and Water Resources Management of the Ruhr-University Bochum and the Department of Hydraulic Engineering and Hydromechanics of the Bochum University of Applied Sciences.

DIRECTED is presenting at EGU 2023 in Vienna
The DIRECTED team is going to introduce our project at the EGU 2023 in natural hazard session NH9.17 – Innovations for multi-sectoral impact assessment, risk modelling and management of natural hazards at The General Assembly 2023 of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) is taking place in Vienna, Austria and online, April 23–28, 2023. The annual EGU General Assembly is the largest and most prominent European geosciences event, attracting over 14,000 scientists from all over the world in the year 2022.

Directed Project Launch
New Horizon Europe Project set to improve climate disaster risk management across multiple civil authorities and first responders in Europe.
Summary points:
- €5.2 Million Horizon Europe Project (DIRECTED) aims to improve the interoperability of multiple European climate risk assessment and planning tools and bring them together in a manageable system (a data fabric) that enables better disaster risk assessment and management by European disaster protection authorities and first responders
- Using ‘Real World Labs’ to critically analyse and improve current work-flows and governance linked to disaster risk management
Details:
A new €5.2 Million Horizon Europe Project, ‘Disaster Resilience for Extreme Climate Events providing Interoperable Data, Models, Communication and Governance (DIRECTED) Project’ was launched on the 29th& 30th November in Braunschweig, Germany and is set to revolutionize the governance and management of climate disasters across multiple civil society and emergency agencies. Physical, social and data scientists are coming together from across Europe with local authorities and first responders to design a new integrated system (a data fabric) that will bring together multiple climate risk assessment tools, disaster warning systems and disaster communication and organisation into one manageable system for use by on-the-ground disaster managers.
Four regional and municipal clusters from the Capital Region of Denmark, the Danube Region, Emilia Romagna Region, Italy and the Rhine-Erft District, Germany are coming together with academic researchers and specialist SME’s from the Technical University of Braunschweig, ETH Zurich, Danish Technical University, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, German Research Centre of GeoScience, University College Cork, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Stockholm Environment Institute, 52 North Spatial Information Research, GECOSistema, Genillard & Co and Oasis Hub to participate in ‘Real World Labs’ analysing on-the-ground practices, governance and systems of multiple disaster practitioners involved in climate disaster planning and disaster management.
The collaboration is a rare opportunity to share disaster risk management practices and problems to enable more efficiencies across disaster protection networks to improve information flow and ability to respond to climate disaster events by providing tailored information to the many agencies involved in large scale disasters and disaster planning.
As well as designing the data fabric, the group will look at how to make multiple climate disaster assessment & planning tools ‘interoperable’ with each other, thus further enabling their functionality to enhance climate disaster risk assessment and on the ground planning and preparedness.
In addition, social scientists will be drawing out how multiple agencies involved in preparing for any major climate emergency can better improve their joint working and understand the disaster authorities and first responders needs for relevant data to manage complex climate disaster risk assessment and resilience planning. The collaboration will also look at how work silos from the many different levels of administration can better work together for more efficient disaster management in the future.
Max Steinhausen, Project Coordinator for the DIRECTED Project states ‘we envisage the impacts that we will have building and combining information on climate extremes and adaptation to climate change will ultimatelygreatly reduce the damages and losses that face the European community in the future.’
About this Project:
[This project is an Innovation Action under the Civil Security for Society, Disaster-Resilient Societies programme of the Horizon Europe funded by the European Union. Project details and a full list of participant organisations can be found on the link: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101073978 . Associate partners SEI Oxford and Oasis Hub are funded by Innovate UK and ETH Zurich is funded by The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), Switzerland]
Contacts:
Project Co-ordinator: Max Steinhausen
Technische Universitaet Braunschweig
Max.steinhausen@tu-braunschweig.de
Project Communications Lead: Tracy Irvine
Oasis Hub Ltd
tracy.irvine@oasishub.io
What: DIRECTED Project Launch
Where: Braunschweig, Germany
When: 29th & 30th November, 2022
Media

BLOG

Real World Lab – The Capital Region of Denmark
Seeking to improve future governance and access to data for climate emergencies
On the 3rd of March, 2023 the first ‘Real World Lab’ of the DIRECTED Project took place, led by the Capital Region of Denmark and the Danish Technical University (DTU) in Hillerød, Denmark. The Lab brought together practitioners, primarily from local municipalities and emergency services in the region, for the first of a range of meetings over the next four years. The meetings will assist in their ability to improve preparation and response to extreme climate events by improving governance systems and providing tailored information to the many actors involved in both emergency response efforts and long-term climate adaptation. The DIRECTED partnership seeks to develop a clear and manageable climate emergencies governance system and bring together interoperable disaster forecasting, climate change risk assessment and adaptation planning tools into one easily usable ‘Data Fabric’ that will enable the necessary information getting into the hands of multiple local stakeholders. Participants in the Lab will collaborate to share knowledge on dealing with and planning for extreme climate events, and to co-produce and test a range of decision support tools.
The Lab is in response to extreme events such as the 2013, Storm Bodil (also known as Storm Xavier, Sinterklaasstorm and Sven) that caused the highest wind gusts ever recorded in Denmark hitting 135 – 153 km/h on the North Atlantic Coast and killing one woman in Denmark and 19 people across Europe. It caused severe damage across the region resulting from wind damage, severe flooding and coastal storm surges. Insurance companies across Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany reported insured losses of €680 million. This event and the potential for other extreme events in the future are driving the partnership to focus on how we might reduce casualties, damage and losses in the future. The ‘Real World Lab’ approach will help local authorities and first responders to better plan for extreme climate events, such as Storm Bodil and assist in the prevention, adaptation and resilience planning at municipality level.
Emilie Rønde Nielsen, Special Consultant for Mobility, Climate, Innovation & Education, at the Capital Region Denmark said “The workshop highlighted the challenges of planning and communicating in an era of climate change uncertainty, both when it comes to extreme climate events but also in terms of longer-term climate change adaptation. Thanks to the committed participants, we gained a detailed insight into the complexities of these processes, as well as an insight into the cross-sectional approach that is needed to overcome silos and enable interoperability.”
Storm ‚Bodil‘ at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde in 2016
What is a Real World Lab?
Real World Labs create collaborative environments for learning and innovation through co-production workshops, demonstrations and training, as well as promoting multi-level collaborative risk governance am
ong actors managing disaster risk and climate adaptation. They seek to work with a range of stakeholders from all levels of governance, including representatives from government, academia, industry and civil society to understand the information needs and co-produce solutions, capturing synergies across Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation, and strengthening resilience against climate change, extreme weather and multi-risk events.
Results of the First Real World Lab
The municipality officers, emergency responders, The Danish Emergency Management and Region Zealand who attended the event worked on a range of exercises enabling stakeholders to share their experiences, issues and concerns on how things had worked in the past and what they felt was needed to improve the current working systems in relation to managing extreme events. Three main themes emerged.
Citizen Responsibility
There was a desire for a better understanding and management of citizen responsibility in extreme events. For example, understanding how to prepare and behave during an event and emergency response volunteer management.
Emilie Rønde Nielsen, Special Consultant for Mobility, Climate, Innovation & Education, at the Capital Region Denmark said “The workshop highlighted the challenges of planning and communicating in an era of climate change uncertainty, both when it comes to extreme climate events but also in terms of longer-term climate change adaptation. Thanks to the committed participants, we gained a detailed insight into the complexities of these processes, as well as an insight into the cross-sectional approach that is needed to overcome silos and enable interoperability.”
Communications and Co-ordination
Broadly, it was felt that the improvements of communication systems should be a priority. Although municipalities and emergency responders are very busy and cooperation between them is going well, they expressed a clear need for higher political focus and allocation of resources. Secondly, they felt that municipalities should improve cross boundary interactions, although it appeared emergency services were more connected across boundaries. There was also a great wish for a common and shared platform for communication and data, so that all actors involved in an extreme weather event can find the same information in just one place.
Data and Simulation
Experiences were relayed on the low accuracy of some of the tools being used for flood prediction, in particular flood levels, causing an under-estimate of the water levels, and in some cases an over-estimate triggering non-essential road closures and health sector responses. Stakeholders expressed an interest in a higher alignment of data between the municipalities and emergency managements, as well as better opportunities to use each other’s measuring stations. They also wanted to know more about and how to access the types and range of tools available to assist both forecasting and adaptation planning, as well as clear national recommendations on which climate scenarios to use. Importantly, stakeholders expressed a desire to work on the simulation of emergency events, as well as work more on managed retreat options in terms of cost/benefit analysis of flood prevention measures.
The meeting ended with participants being asked who else should be invited to be involved in the DIRECTED work. The municipality and emergency responder representatives at the event suggested that national actors including the Hydro-met agency, regional actors, including health care system providers, Danish Road Directorate, dike groups, utility companies, the Homeguard, other municipalities and emergency management agencies, the police, municipality GIS experts and municipality communication staff, as well as community level emergency management volunteers and citizens involved in climate adaptation activity should be invited to participate in future events. Clearly, this list of stakeholders shows the complexity of climate emergency management, but the DIRECTED Project hope through the management of this complexity through improving governance systems, making climate data and models more interoperable to enable local use and providing innovative data and communication through a ‘Data Fabric’, the sharing of data and information will begin to make local climate emergency management fit for the climate change challenges ahead.
For more information about the Capital Region, Denmark, Real World Lab please contact:
Emilie Rønde, Specialconsultant – emilie.roende.nielsen@regionh.dk or
Amalie Vestergaard Laursen, Consultant – amalie.laursen@regionh.dk
For any further information about the Project, please contact: info@directedproject.eu
About this Project:
[This project is an Innovation Action under the Civil Security for Society, Disaster-Resilient Societies programme of the Horizon Europe funded by the European Union. Project details and a full list of participant organisations can be found on the link: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101073978. Associate partners SEI Oxford and Oasis Hub are funded by Innovate UK and ETH Zurich is funded by The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), Switzerland]
by Tracy Irvine, Oasis Hub Ltd

Moving out of the silos
Learning to collaborate and manage increasing climate change disaster risks and climate adaptation together.
In Europe, as globally, we face an increasing frequency and intensity of climate-related extreme events caused by climate change. According to the global reinsurer, Swiss Re, in 2021 global flood events claimed over 2500 lives and caused US$80 billion in economic loss. In addition, Europe experienced the largest floods ever, as well the highest economic and insured losses for flood anywhere in the world in.
We were all shocked to see the news footage of flood damage and economic losses caused by floods in July 2021 in the Rhine Basin, Germany, where 220 people lost their lives and Euro 30 Billion of economic damage occurred in just one night, that even today, in 2023, impacts the lives of thousands of people as they recover from this disaster. It highlights how Germany, like most European countries, are unprepared for the potential scale of disasters in the future that are likely to be caused by climate change, ageing flood protection infrastructure and land-use changes. Indeed, ‘Swiss-re-institute-sigma-natcat-2022 Report’ (2022) predicts there is a long-term upward trend in climate-related disasters globally.
Figure 1. 2021 Global Economic and Flood Losses; Swiss Re Institute-sigma-natcat, 2022
Therefore, Europe needs to step up its action towards Climate-related disaster management and climate adaptation.
Funded as a Horizon Europe project by the European Union, the ‘Disaster Resilience for Extreme Climate Events providing Interoperable Data, Models, Communication and Governance (DIRECTED) Project, seeks to assist better planning and information for disaster risk assessment, forecasting, management and climate change adaptation.
We believe that improved disaster management and climate change adaptation is not just about having the most scientifically advanced information at your fingertips, but equally important is the governance and information access and flow and the ability of different actors to understand and utilise appropriate information tailored to their needs.
Figure 2. Swiss Re Institute (2022) Graph showing 10-year trends in disaster events; Swiss Re Institute-sigma-natcat, 2022
Our Mission objectives are:
Overcome silos between technical and political authorities of all levels, including organisations, sectors and disciplines by improving dialogues and communication among DRR and CCA actors and by promoting the exchange and integration of information and knowledge.
Leverage synergies, combine efforts and reduce the fragmentation within DRR and CCA domains, including addressing multi-level governance and different spatial and temporal scales.
Promote multi-risk thinking by means of a novel transdisciplinary multi-risk governance framework related to climate extremes (RISK-TANDEM) aimed at assessing, evaluating, managing and communicating multi-hazard, multi-risk issues in close collaboration with engaged stakeholders, practitioners and concerned citizens.
Build capacity and lasting real-world partnerships and collaboration between involved actors that will last beyond the project.
Exploit the power of open data and open science, improving capabilities (e.g. using a flexible Data Fabric architecture) to make use of scattered information for more effective decisions, including knowledge and tools developed within past, present and future research and innovation initiatives.
Working with local clusters of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) specialists at the coal face in Germany, Italy, Denmark and across the Danube Region we will facilitate ‘Real World Labs’ where local and national authorities, first & second responders, climate change adaptation planners, businesses, physical and social scientists will work together in these regional hubs to identify institutional barriers and silos and improve tailored and relevant information flow to organisations working within disaster management and climate change.
Figure 3. Map of the Real World Labs – in the DIRECTED Project
We will also be demonstrating some existing scientific climate change risk assessment and adaptation tools developed previously in the science and insurance sectors and look at how the flow of this information might be made interoperable thus increasing more joined up information flows, easily useable by on-the-ground practitioners during emergencies and disaster risk planning and risk reduction processes.
One thing we know, is this will be a highly collaborative project, where the participants will need to step back, understand and collaborate with professionals from different disciplines. We think we have the team to make this happen!
In addition, we would like to converse more broadly with the disaster risk and climate adaptation professionals across Europe and beyond to bring greater understanding and knowledge exchange in the work we are doing, to achieve better and more widely applicable outputs from the Project.
And this is where YOU come in… We will be communicating through a range of social media channels about the work we are doing over the next 4 years. In particular, we have opened a DIRECTED Project Group on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14155514/ where we will talk about our findings from the Real World Labs, talk about some of the scientific disaster risk assessment, forecasting and climate change adaptation tools and how we might make them more interoperable and ask questions of DRR & CCA practitioners like yourselves, to help us think about how information needs to flow in disaster situations and more broadly co-ordinate knowledge exchange in this space.
Therefore, please do come along and join us on LinkedIn as we begin our Project:
[pods name="systeminhalt" slug="social-media-blog" template="display-content"]For any further information about the Project, please contact:info@directedproject.eu
About this Project:
[This project is an Innovation Action under the Civil Security for Society, Disaster-Resilient Societies programme of the Horizon Europe funded by the European Union. Project details and a full list of participant organisations can be found on the link: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101073978. Associate partners SEI Oxford and Oasis Hub are funded by Innovate UK and ETH Zurich is funded by The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), Switzerland]
by Tracy Irvine, Oasis Hub Ltd
Product
Solutions
Directed will boost the integration, accessibility and interoperability of data, models and tools supporting Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management: from early warning systems through communication and climate change risk assessment tools.
coming soon
Contact Us
Technische Universität Braunschweig
Dept. of Hydrology and River Basin Management
Leichtweiß-Institute for Hydraulic Engineering
Beethovenstrasse 51a, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany