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25 Sep 2020 |
EU-VRi publishes new Annual Report 2019-2020 |
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EU-VRi's Annual Report 2019-2020 is out. Download here.
The newly published Annual Report focuses on the topic of security & resilience and further collaboration with industry.
The role of EU-VRi in the European and internationals risk-related activities is further strengthened with various initiatives and projects. Keynotes, contributions, papers and presentations at meetings and conferences have clearly confirmed this. New addition to the report is also the European Risk & Resilience Assessment and Rating Initiative (ERRA) following the successful completion of the SmartResilience[1]. The concept is intended to provide services that include education (e.g. certified course in the area of risk and resilience), certification and management of auditors (certification scheme to be accredited), managing/facilitating ad-hoc consultancy (e.g. the consultancy provided by the members) and research coordination to cluster members and other organization.
[1] http://www.smartresilience.eu-vri.eu/
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17 Jul 2020 |
Cluster Excellence Expert(s) Recruitment for Cluster Training |
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Invitation to supply an expertise service for the training Programme for Capacity Building (6 Clusters, 12 Participants) - Expert(s) Recruitment for Clusters training.
Reference: EXTRATEX/TRAINING/02/2020
Programme: COSME
Duration and timing: 2 months in total, from October 1st 2020 to November 30th 2020
A public call for applicants is open for the task indicated in the subject. The Term of Reference provides details and instructions to be followed by eligible applicants.
Applications can be sent by email from July 17th 2020 included to August 31th 2020 included. |
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12 Jun 2020 |
EU-VRi article on #COVID-19 published in the “Environment Systems and Decisions" Springer edition |
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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.
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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 |
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03 Jun 2020 |
ESCA Experts Recruitment for Clusters Benchmarking |
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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.
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02 Jun 2020 |
2020 CBRN Stakeholder survey |
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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
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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 |
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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.

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EC4SafeNano
European Centre for Risk Management and Safe Innovation in Nanomaterials & Nanotechnologies
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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?
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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 |
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13 Apr 2020 |
SmartResilience final achievements |
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The SmartResilience H2020 project, coordinated by EU-VRi, has finished and its main results are released.

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SmartResilience
Smart Resilience Indicators for Smart Critical Infrastructures
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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:
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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).
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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. |

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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. |
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