Introduction

One of the goals of the FP7 calls, both under the Environment and Security themes, is to improve the resilience of society to catastrophic natural hazards through new risk-management approaches in particular related to critical infrastructures and possible domino effects. As such it was decided to establish a "coordination mechanism" between the Work Programme Security: SEC.2013.2.1-2 - Impact of extreme weather on critical infrastructure and the Work Programme Environment: ENV.2013.6.4-4 - Towards stress tests for critical infrastructures against natural hazards. Other calls dealing with similar issues were also included.

The objective of the coordination mechanism is to establish an effective collaboration between different projects, which are dealing with similar issues (critical protection against natural hazards, extreme events LP-HI, and cascading effects in crisis situations), to avoid redundancies and potential duplication of efforts, and to improve the quality of the expected results and  boost their impact. Furthermore, the implementation of this mechanism is considered essential as it contributes to some extent to a better definition of regional, national and European measures or policies in this domain, by providing improved methods, tools, guidelines, best practices, and reliable standards facilitating a European approach and vision for more harmonised safety for critical infrastructures and resilience against natural hazards and cascading effects in crisis situations in Europe

In particular, Coordination was requested between INFRARISK, RAIN (FP7-SEC.2013.2.1-2), STREST (ENV.2013.6.4-4) and INTACT (FP7-SEC.2013.2.1-2):

RAIN - Risk Analysis of Infrastructure Networks in Response to Extreme Weather

www.rain-project.eu

In recent years, a variety of extreme weather events, including droughts, rain induced landslides, river floods, winter storms, wildfire, and hurricanes, have threatened and damaged many different regions across Europe and worldwide. These events can have a devastating impact on critical infrastructure systems. The RAIN vision is to develop a systematic risk management framework that explicitly considers the impacts of extreme weather events on critical infrastructure and develops a series of mitigation tools to enhance the security of the pan European infrastructure network.

STREST - Harmonised Approach to stress tests for critical infrastructures against natural hazards.

www.strest-eu.org
 

Moving toward a safer and more resilient society requires improved and standardized tools for hazard and risk assessment of low probability-high consequence (LP-HC) events, and their systematic application to whole classes of CIs, targeting integrated risk mitigation strategies. Among the most important assessment tools are the stress tests, designed to test the vulnerability and resilience of individual CIs and infrastructure systems. The objectives of STREST are to establish a common and consistent taxonomy of non-nuclear CIs; Develop a rigorous, consistent modelling approach to hazard, vulnerability, risk and resilience assessment of LP-HC events; Design a stress test framework and specific applications to address the vulnerability, resilience and interdependencies of CIs; and enable the implementation of European policies for the systematic implementation of stress tests

INTACT - On the Impact of Extreme Weather on Critical Infrastructures

www.intact-project.eu

More and more often we are confronted with Extreme Weather Events (EWE). These can damage our critical infrastructure in different ways. The goal of the INTACT project is to gather information on the effect of EWE on critical infrastructure and on solutions and measures that can be taken. This information will be incorporated in a reference guide to help create more durable and lasting infrastructure.