Mitigating the impacts of extreme weather originated disasters by simulating the effects of different preparation and action decisions of crisis management: (poster)

The CRISMA project develops an integrated planning and decision support tool set for crises response to potentially disastrous events with immediate, extensive, and lasting consequences for population and society. The envisaged integrated tool set encompasses a set of simulation models for evaluation of the effectiveness, limitations and resource allocation implications of prevention and remediation measures taken in hypothetical - yet feasible – scenarios in the context of education, training, planning and reviewing of crisis response organizations, infrastructure and personnel. Thanks to the inclusion of cascading and multi-risk effects, also more complex vulnerability assessments are feasible. Similarly, cascading and multirisk effects aggravated by the interaction between physical and societal processes can be accounted for when the system applied to long term planning questions. The project includes five elaborate pilots, which function as testing ground for the models and concepts (further) developed in CRISMA. Two of these pilots concern severe Nordic winter storms and Western-European coastal flooding respectively, thereby representing extreme weather events which are typically expected to occur more frequently in many parts of Europe as a result of climate change. The envisaged model system should not only generate benefits for crisis management operations as such, but
also regarding the technical, organisational and social preparedness of a region or set of regions with respect to natural hazards. The project also considers the operational and strategic implications of improving border crossing co-operation in crisis management and related planning. Therefore, all in all, the envisaged system can be considered as a contribution to a reduction of vulnerability and increase of resilience with respect to natural hazards, as inter alia recommended in the IPCC SREX report and pursued in many national adaptation plans in Europe. The system is meant to be used for short term and long term planning, as well as reviewing and training purposes, and aims indeed at a better integration and related presentation of crisis management information. However, the various end-user-stakeholders tend to emphasize the different capacities to a differing extent. The ambitious data-integration entails extensive use of geo-data, such as from GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security – a programme of the European Community; http://www.gmes.info/). The CRISMA project (www.crismaproject.eu) is co-ordinated by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and funded by the European Community's 7th Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 284552. The consortium counts 17 partners from 9 countries. The project ends in August 2015.