The HuT will employ innovative disaster risk reduction solutions, accounting for the potential variations induced by climate change. This will involve integrating and leveraging best practices and successful multi-disciplinary experiences that have been recently developed within various territorial contexts by leading European research groups, institutions, and stakeholders, to deal with extreme climate events. The project’s main ambition beyond the state of the art is to promote the “best set” of trans-disciplinary risk management tools and approaches that could be adopted and used extensively across Europe, in as many situations as possible. The activities of the project will be developed considering the following main critical dimensions: trans-disciplinarity, systemic risk, co-production, cross-fertilization, transferability, and long-term legacy. A set of ten demonstrators will constitute a multi-hazard arena wherein possible disastrous events associated with climate extremes will be dealt with jointly by representatives of the scientific and technical communities, practitioners, policy-makers and local communities. The events associated to climate extremes that will be considered in this project are: forest fires, including wildland urban interface fires; meteorological/hydrological/agricultural droughts, including associated water shortage; heatwaves; weather-induced landslides, including debris flows; fluvial and pluvial floods; storms, including heavy rain, hail, thunderstorms, and storm surges. The HuT will mainly focus on the prevention and preparedness phases of the disaster risk management cycle, explicitly considering climate change scenarios and integrating the proposed set of solutions, for the various events considered, over short- (from days to several months) and long-term (from years to decades) time horizons.

Considering the socio-ecological transition of Europe 2030, and towards a more resilient and informed community, focusing on the forests that are near wildfire risk, TREEADS aims to build upon state-of-the-art high TRL products and unite them in a holistic Fire Management platform that optimize and reuse per phase the available Socio-technological Resources in all three main phases of Wildfires. For the prevention and preparedness TREEADS propose the use of a real-time risk evaluation tool that can receive multiple classification inputs and work with a new proposed neural network-powered Risk factor indicator. To create a model of Fire adapted communities (FAC) in parallel to insurance incentives, TREEADS will use alkali activated construction materials (AAM) integrating post-wildfires wood ashes (PWA) for fire-resilient buildings and infrastructure. TREEADS also uses a variety of technological solutions such as the Copernicus infrastructure, and a swarm of small drones customized for accurate forest supervision. In the area of Detection TREEADS propose a variety of toolsets that will accommodate most needs. Stemming from Virtual reality for the training, wearables for the protective equipment of the emergency responders. to UAV (drones), UAG and airships for improving capacity in temporal and spatial analysis as well as to increase the inspected area coverage. Last, TREEADS will build a new land and field-based restoration initiative that will use all modern techniques such as agroforestry, drones for seed spread, Internet of things sensors that will be able to adapt the seeding process based on the ground needs and on the same time with the help of AI to determine post-fire risks factors. TREEADS solution will be demonstrated and validated under real operating conditions. Demonstration will involve Eight complex pilot implementations executed in seven EU countries and in Taiwan.