The project aimed at improving preparedness of societies to cope with complex crisis situations by means of providing integrated tools to support efficient response planning and the building of realistic multidisciplinary scenarios. The project designed and developed a system for improving response planning strategies and scenario building (TRL 7/ 8) and facilitating organizational coordination among many actors, integrating a wide range of support tools to be used operationally by a large variety of stakeholders (firefighting units, medical emergency services, police departments, civil protection units, command and control centres). The devised system has integrated existing and newly developed tools to enhance the cooperation between autonomous systems (satellite-, sea-, land- and air-based) from different agencies as well as to consolidate the methodology for cross-border scenario-building.

The project investigated the currently existing tools and methodologies with the involvement of local authorities and end users and provided mechanisms to enhance cooperation among all involved actors. The main domains considered were:

• The EU Civil Protection Mechanism (natural and man-made disasters, including events affecting critical infrastructure)
• IPCC recommendations in relation to extreme climatic events
• the Sendai Framework

The project was developed on the basis of realistic scenarios in specific geographical areas with the close involvement of local authorities and at the end of it, due to Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, demonstrated in a realistic environment in a hybrid format (live streaming of on-site activities and pre-recorded events). Although the project developed a flexible system adaptable to integrate multiple hazard-specific tools, the main scenarios considered were: forest fire, flood, flash floods and landslides.

The Ethics Centre provided human factors analysis, societal acceptance and ethical acceptability analysis and ethical issues analysis in cooperation with the end users involved in the project. The Ethics Centre  provided a detailed theoretical analysis of the system and its features from an ethics and social science point of view and conducted empirical research in the form of focus groups and interviews with key stakeholders.