Vulnerable Elements and Risk Assessment

ongoing

Disasters and risks know no borders. Therefore, most natural and man-made disasters present transboundary risks due to their spatial dimension as well as the volatility and scale of their human, economic or environmental impacts of these hazards, as well as their probability of occurrence, exist regardless of national borders. During the VESPRA project (GA:UCPM/2020/101004896) the following results were obtained: (1) a harmonised catalogue of vulnerable elements applicable in transboundary domains, (2) a platform for collecting vulnerability at all scales together with (3) a decision making tool for four hazards (meteorological, industrial, nuclear and forest fires). All this was tested in (4) real field exercises on the Spanish-Portuguese border. Due to the growing interest in these results, VERA is presented as a continuation of VESPRA to the call for proposals of the European Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) of the European Union to explore new analyses and functionalities extending the capabilities described in the previous project. VERA thus arises with the aim of improving cross-border risk management mechanisms, with an improved multi-risk approach, extending the capabilities of the platform developed by taking advantage of existing data from European services (Copernicus, Galileo or JRC) and extending the analysis to the entire Spanish-Portuguese and Spanish-French border (Catalonia-France). In addition, its operation and usefulness will be applied in real demonstrations carried out in-situ. The duration of the project will be 24 months. Before the 10th month the first version of the system is expected to be available for evaluation and to incorporate improvements before the final implementation.