12 Jun
2020		 EU-VRi article on #COVID-19 published in the “Environment Systems and Decisions" Springer edition
News Photo EU-VRi is proud to announce the publication of the its article “Assessing resilience of healthcare infrastructure exposed to COVID-19: emerging risks, resilience indicators, interdependencies and international standards" in the Springer edition “Environment Systems and Decisions". This article has been prepared in close collaboration with several EU-VRi partners, namely Steinbeis R-Tech, MUW, SWICA, SINTEF, DRK and BJAST.



 

Authors: A. Jovanović, P. Klimek, O. Renn, R. Schneider, K. Øien, J. Brown, M. DiGennaro, Y. Liu, V. Pfau, M. Jelić, T. Rosen, B. Caillard, S. Chakravarty & P. Chhantyal

Abstract:

In the moment of preparation of this paper, the world is still globally in grip of the Corona (COVID-19) crisis, and the need to understand the broader overall framework of the crisis increases. As in similar cases in the past, also with this one, the main interest is on the “first response”. Fully appreciating the efforts of those risking their lives facing pandemics, this paper tries to identify the main elements of the larger, possibly global, framework, supported by international standards, needed to deal with new (emerging) risks resulting from threats like Corona and assess the resilience of systems affected. The paper proposes that future solutions should include a number of new elements, related to both risk and resilience. That should include broadening the scope of attention, currently focused onto preparation and response phases, to the phases of “understanding risks”, including emerging risks, and transformation and adaptation. The paper suggests to use resilience indicators in this process. The proposed approach has been applied in different cases involving critical infrastructures in Europe (energy supply, water supply, transportation, etc., exposed to various threats), including the health system in Austria. The detailed, indicator-based, resilience analysis included mapping resilience, resilience stress-testing, visualization, etc., showing, already before the COVID-19, the resilience (stress-testing) limits of the infrastructures. A simpler (57 indicator based) analysis has, then been done for 11 countries (including Austria). The paper links these results with the options available in the area of policies, standards, guidelines and tools (such as the RiskRadar), with focus on interdependencies and global standards—especially the new ISO 31,050, linking emerging risks and resilience.

 

Download the article at the following link: https://rdcu.be/b4I4q

How to cite this article: Jovanović, A., Klimek, P., Renn, O. et al. Assessing resilience of healthcare infrastructure exposed to COVID-19: emerging risks, resilience indicators, interdependencies and international standards. Environ Syst Decis (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-020-09779-8
03 Jun
2020		 ESCA Experts Recruitment for Clusters Benchmarking
News Photo Invitation to supply an expertise service for benchmarking and labelling of industrial clusters - Expert(s) Recruitment for Clusters Benchmarking and labelling.



Reference: EXTRATEX/BENCHMARKING/01/2020

Programme: COSME

Duration and timing: 6.5 months in total, from August 1st 2020 to February 15th 2021

 

A public call for applicants is open for the task indicated in the subject. The Term of Reference provide details and instructions to be followed by eligible applicants

Applications can be sent from June 4th 2020 included to July 15th included.

Applications received before or after the indicated limit dates will be disregarded.
02 Jun
2020		 2020 CBRN Stakeholder survey
News Photo ENCIRCLE launched the "2020 CBRN Stakeholder survey" covering CBRN specific areas and also general questions concerning standards and procurement so are applicable to not just the CBRN community, an additional area included is hybrid-threats.



The ENCIRCLE project ran a number of surveys concerning the market, standards and interoperability in Years 1 and 2. These surveys have been combined so we can compare any progress and changes against the original results. The survey takes the form of 18 multiple choice questions and two open questions, which should not take long to complete and are provided in English, French, German and Italian. The questions cover CBRN specific areas and also general questions concerning standards and procurement so are applicable to not just the CBRN community, an additional area included is hybrid-threats. The survey results are anonymous and it will be open until July 31st. We will then publish and present the results in September 2020.

The survey can be found at the following: https://www.sli.do/

 

  • CBRN Stakeholder Survey – English: Event code: #ENCIRCLE-P1
  • CBRN Stakeholder Survey – French: Event Code #ENCIRCLE-FR1
  • CBRN Stakeholder Survey – Italian: Event Code #ENCIRCLE-IT1
  • CBRN Stakeholder Survey – German: Event Code #ENCIRCLE-DE1

 
13 Apr
2020		 EC4SafeNano proposal for the creation of a self-sustainable European-wide virtual Centre for risk management and safe innovation in nanomaterials and nanotechnology
News Photo The H2020 project is now completed, with a concrete proposal for the creation of a self-sustainable European-wide virtual Centre for risk management and safe innovation in nanomaterials and nanotechnology.



EC4SafeNano

European Centre for Risk Management and Safe Innovation in Nanomaterials & Nanotechnologies

The H2020 project is now completed, with a concrete proposal for the creation of a self-sustainable European-wide virtual Centre for risk management and safe innovation in nanomaterials and nanotechnology.

What is the EU project about?

  The EC4SafeNano project objective was to build a distributed Centre of European organizations offering services for Risk Management and Safe Innovation for Nanomaterials & Nanotechnologies. EC4SafeNano aimed to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge on hazard and risk, and ‘fit-for-purpose’ risk management tools and strategies supported by measurement and control methods. The consortium comprises 15 partners from 11 European Member States with significant expertise on risk assessment and management, who already provide knowledge and technical services to public and private organizations, to industry and to public authorities and regulatory bodies.

What are the main outcomes?

  • Mapping of the needs and resources available
  • Fit-and-gap analysis tool to match the customer needs with the available resources, and identify uncovered or poorly-covered customer demand.
  • Inventories of available tools, methods, training courses, standards and standard operating procedures (SOPs), guidance documents and best practices
  • Catalogue of services: methods, guidance, studies, standards, training or  certification, helpdesk, support for the development of national expertise centres...
  • Robust collaborative open structure and network, gathering and sharing the best available resources and knowledge from Europe and beyond, with a governance, a business model, and evaluation and update mechanisms and operating procedures.

What will be the benefit as a member of the EC4SafeNano Center?

  • Access to the worldwide available information on institutes, projects and experts in the field of nanosafety and nanotechnologies
  • Access to highly qualified services providers and a higher guarantee of the quality of the services provided thanks to a collective service review
  • Opportunities to promote and participate in initiatives for harmonization of methods & services
  • Active involvement at an early stage in the debate on highly strategic topics
  • Enhanced opportunities to establish quicker contact with other partners and reach the critical mass on a given priority topic
  • A bigger voice speaking to the institutions
  • Reducing the effort and cost of development and harmonization at EU level of approaches for risk assessment & management in nanosafety

What are the services offered by the center?

  • HELP DESK to create an efficient interface with external customers and facilitating access to technical information and the available Catalogue of Services
  • PROVISION OF TECHNICAL EXPERTISE AND SCIENCE-BASED ADVICE to questions (simple and complex demands, review of services) raised by stakeholders, including regulatory bodies and competent authorities
  • ANNUAL JOINT PROGRAMME OF ACTIVITIES (JPA) to organize activities, collectively agreed by the members of the Centre, such as interlaboratory studies, expert group meetings on high-priority topics selected by members, position papers, guidance documents, etc.
  • DEVELOPMENT AND PROMOTION OF HARMONIZED SERVICES by the creation and promotion of EU certification of marked services and the training of service providers.
  • REGULAR PROMOTION OF THE ACTIVITIES OF THE CENTRE to provide an overview of research projects, standardisation activities and other relevant initiatives in the field of nanosafety in Europe and beyond.

Role of EU-VRi

Besides the support to the coordinator (INERIS) for the project management, monitoring and reporting, the main contributions of EU-VRi were the analysis of the needs of the civil society, the collective development of the business model and business plan of the center and the development of the online version of the catalogue.

 

More information on the project, the public deliverables and the current Catalogue of Services can be found at the project website http://ec4safenano.eu/. The site also posts an open invitation for research labs or companies providing NanoSafety services to join the future Centre and/or promote their resources and expertise through the Centre.

Duration: 36 Months / Partners: 15 / Programme: Coordination & Support Action in H2020 / Budget-EC Grant: approx. 2-2 Million Euro
13 Apr
2020		 SmartResilience final achievements
News Photo

The SmartResilience H2020 project, coordinated by EU-VRi, has finished and its main results are released.





 SmartResilience
Smart Resilience Indicators for Smart Critical Infrastructures

The SmartResilience H2020 project, coordinated by EU-VRi, has finished and its main results are released.

SmartResilience in a nutshell

Modern critical infrastructures are becoming increasingly smarter (e.g. the smart cities). Making the infrastructures smarter usually means making them smarter in the normal operation and use: more adaptive, more intelligent etc. But will these smart critical infrastructures (SCIs) behave smartly and be smartly resilient also when exposed to extreme threats, such as extreme weather disasters or terrorist attacks? If making existing infrastructure smarter is achieved by making it more complex, would it also make it more vulnerable? Would this affect resilience of an SCI as its ability to anticipate, prepare for, adapt and withstand, respond to, and recover? What are the resilience indicators (RIs) which one has to look at?
These are the main questions tackled by the SmartResilience project.
The project answered the above questions in several steps: (1) By identifying existing indicators suitable for assessing resilience of SCIs, (2) By identifying new smart resilience indicators including those from Big Data, (3) By developing, a new advanced resilience assessment methodology based on smart RIs and the resilience indicators cube, including the resilience matrix, (4) By developing the interactive SCI Dashboard tool, and (5) By applying the methodology/tools in 8 case studies, integrated under one virtual, smart-city-like, European case study. The SCIs considered (in 8 European countries!) deal with energy, transportation, health, and water.
Responding to EC Call H2020-DRS-2014-2015: Disaster Resilience: Safeguarding and securing society, including adapting to climate change, the project produced a complete resilience assessment methodology with several accompanying tools, notably the ResilienceTool which supports all of the developed methodology’s features. The methodology and its tools’ good reception made it clear to the consortium that the tool should and could be developed further which actually drove it from the promised RTL4 level (validation in lab) to a fully operational tool at TRL7 (operational prototype) with several real-world cases already implemented within.
Additionally, later in the project, the consortium identified an opportunity to drive the project’s results’ dissemination further and created the new work package (WP9): Ensuring uptake and sustainability of project results which would form the basis for the development of the European Risk and Resilience Assessment agency (ERRA) and that will see the embedding of the project’s results in the new ISO standard 31050: Guidance for managing emerging risks to enhance resilience.
For more information regarding the ResilienceTool, a full user guide is publically available as deliverable D3.7: “The ResilienceTool” of the SmartResilience project on the SmartResilience project’s website.

Main results

The European project SmartResilience has yielded five major break-through results:

1.    Method:
An innovative state-of-the art concept enabling quantitative assessment of resilience. The concept aims combines the advantages of approaches oriented towards the easy-to-understand communication of the assessments results (such as “resilience very high” or “resilience level red”) with the advantages of the in-depth assessment approaches, providing many, but often difficult to understand results (e.g. detailed textual reports from complex resilience exercises). This main elements of the indicator-based concept are the “resilience cube” at the top, and the assessment methodology allowing to (a) assess resilience in a given moment in time and monitor it over the time, (b) analyze it during a particular adverse effect scenario, (c) benchmark it, (d) stress-test it, (e) analyze it in a system of multiple infrastructures and, last but not least, (f) optimize it a transparent and intuitive way. The concept is public, presented in publications and presentation and is being summarized in a book under preparation with the publisher (Springer).

 

 2.    Tool:
The concept is applied within a web-based system, the main elements of which are the resilience indicator database (over 4,000 indicators available, over 3,000 indicators and almost 1,000 issues), the web-suite of tools (over 20different, combining those pertinent and developed within SmartResilience project with the “” external” ones) and repository of the application cases, the later in itself supporting future analyses.

 

 3.    Applications:
The concept has been practically applied in 19 case studies in which over 300 different resilience assessments were made, about 30% of those made for the stakeholders outside the project (e.g. in other DRS EU projects or the institutions supporting the partners in the projects – e.g. ministries). The concept has been discussed and agreed with over 50 different organizational stakeholders, setup at 7 external-to-the-project “MySmartResilience” sub-sites.