Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) has highlighted the link between public healthcare and the broader context of operational response to complex crises. Data are needed to support the work of the emergency services and enhance governance. This study develops a Europe-wide analysis of perceptions, needs and priorities of the public affected by the Covid-19 emergency. An online multilingual survey was conducted from mid-May until mid-July 2020. The questionnaire investigates perceptions of public healthcare, emergency management and societal resilience. In total, N = 3029 valid answers were collected. They were analysed both as a whole and focusing on the most represented countries (Italy, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom). Our findings highlight some perceived weaknesses in emergency management that are associated with the underlying vulnerability of the global interconnected society and public healthcare systems. The spreading of the epidemic in Italy represented a ‘tipping point’ for perceiving Covid-19 as an ‘emergency’ in the surveyed countries. The respondents uniformly suggested a preference for gradually restarting activities. We observed a tendency to ignore the cascading effects of Covid-19 and possible concurrence of threats. Our study highlights the need for practices designed to address the next phases of the Covid-19 crisis and prepare for future systemic shocks. Cascading effects that could compromise operational capacity need to be considered more carefully. We make the case for the reinforcement of cross-border coordination of public health initiatives, for standardization in business continuity management, and for dealing with the recovery at the European level.
Among the many repercussions of the COVID-19 emergency to be assessed, those on critical infrastructures and the associated businesses and professions are certainly important ones. In this paper, we document the conception, implementation and outcome of a survey organized by European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and entitled “COVID-19: Emergency & Business Continuity” . This was conducted in April-May 2020 with the participation of critical infrastructure experts (including professionals from the academia and research institutions, infrastructure operators and industry representatives, public authorities and members of security agencies), involved as stakeholders in the European Reference Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection (ERNCIP). Themes explored through this study include an assessment of the business continuity status and the evaluation of emergency management and disaster recovery aspects, as experienced from the perspective of different sectors, organization types and personal perceptions of the respondents.
Natural materials, such as soils, are influenced by many factors acting during their formative and evolutionary process: atmospheric agents, erosion and transport phenomena, sedimentation conditions that give soil properties a non-reducible randomness by using sophisticated survey techniques and technologies. This character is reflected not only in spatial variability of properties which differs from point to point, but also in multivariate correlation as a function of reciprocal distance.Cognitive enrichment, offered by the response of soils associated with their intrinsic spatial variability, implies an increase in the evaluative capacity of the contributing causes and potential effects in failure phenomena.Stability analysis of natural slopes is well suited to stochastic treatment of uncertainty which characterized landslide risk. In particular, this study has been applied through a back-analysis procedure to a slope located in Southern Italy that was subject to repeated phenomena of hydrogeological instability (extended for several kilometres in recent years). The back-analysis has been carried out by applying spatial analysis to the controlling factors as well as quantifying the hydrogeological hazard through unbiased estimators.A natural phenomenon, defined as stochastic process characterized by mutually interacting spatial variables, has led to identify the most critical areas, giving reliability to the scenarios and improving the forecasting content.Moreover, the phenomenological characterization allows the optimization of the risk levels to the wide territory involved, supporting decision-making process for intervention priorities as well as the effective allocation of the available resources in social, environmental and economic contexts.
The dissemination of purposely deceitful or misleading content to target audiences for political aims or economic purposes constitutes a threat to democratic societies and institutions, and is being increasingly recognized as a major security threat, particularly after evidence and allegations of hostile foreign interference in several countries surfaced in the last five years. Disinformation can also be part of hybrid threat activities. This research paper examines findings on the effects of disinformation and addresses the question of how effective counterstrategies against digital disinformation are, with the aim of assessing the impact of responses such as the exposure and disproval of disinformation content and conspiracy theories. The paper’s objective is to synthetize the main scientific findings on disinformation effects and on the effectiveness of debunking, inoculation, and forewarning strategies against digital disinformation. A mixed methodology is used, combining qualitative interpretive analysis and structured technique for evaluating scientific literature such as a systematic literature review (SLR), following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework.
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