29.11.2022

DIRECTED PROJECT LAUNCH

01 Team_About

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