Technological and natural disasters occurred in Europe during last decades showed an increased vulnerability of our society to different risks. Authorities and civil protection need instruments which allow having a better understanding of the variety of risks over a territory and help them in managing the resources and planning the emergency. However, many difficulties arise in comparing hazards, vulnerabilities and risks among them. The existing risk mapping in European countries often allows a simplified comparison of risks by means of potential damages but does not permit any qualitative assessment of multi-risk situations.The aim of this project carried out for the Piedmont Region (Italy) is the development of a decision support system based on a multi-risk approach which can overcome difficulties in the overall risk assessment over a territory. To define multi-risk maps, a multi-risk perspective and stakeholder's perceptions were integrated to a classical risk assessment frame.The specific purpose of this work is describing the methodological framework built up at this stage of the project and discussing the first results.
The systematic and complete identification of relevant disruption scenarios for Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems is still one of the major challenges to achieve higher resilience performance. We assist Authorities and Operators in this endeavour through creating a comprehensive and multi-dimensional allhazards catalogue for CI. It is implemented by developing two ontologies: • CI systems Ontology, covering Energy, Transport, Water and Telecommunications sectors, each being described through two sub-ontologies (physical and functional) interconnected within the service delivery topology.; • Hazards & Threats Ontology, characterising different typologies of events, their attributes, types and possible effects to CI systems. The two ontologies are connected through vulnerability and (inter)dependency models. The main results achieved include: i) a generalised and standardised specification framework for CIs and services; ii) a generalised and standardised all-hazards catalogue for CI; and iii) an improved scenario generation process to support CI risk assessment.
Effective Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience (CIP-R) depends on numerous stakeholders collaborating at different institutional and operational levels and exchanging information by means of a variety of channels. In this regard regional programmes or partnerships, have emerged as one of the key strategies to deal with CIP-R and Emergency Management (EM) issues effectively. Previous research has set the theoretical base of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) and claimed their high potential for enhancing CIP-R that is vastly unexploited due to challenges in their establishment and management. It is now necessary to move forward to studying practical side of these programmes. MIRACLE (Multi-level Alignment of Regional Approaches to CI Resilience by Learning from Experience) is a research project funded by EC-DG HOME that aims at supporting regional CIP-R strategies in order to improve exiting capacities of the EU Member States to prevent, prepare and protect people against security related risks. This study presents a review of existing Good Practices (GPs), i.e. tools, technologies, activities and processes that are able to support: i) Establishment and management of regional PPPs for CIP-R; ii) Achievement of their main objectives and specific goals. The collected GPs are used to improve resilience levels in different phases of EM. GPs have been identified through an online survey, institutional websites, insights from professionals, available reports, documents and scientific literature. Finally, through engagement of international experts, professionals and researchers the GPs have been evaluated along three main parameters: implementation effort, transferability potential, type and relevance of expected benefits.
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