Large scale crises are affecting critical infrastructures with a growing frequency. This is a result of both basic exposure and dependencies between infrastructures. Because of prohibitive costs, the paradigm of protection against extreme events is expanding and now also encompasses the paradigm of resilience. In addition to strengthening and securing systems; system design objectives are now being set, and response planning is being carried out, to facilitate a fast recovery of infrastructure following a large scale incident. With an interconnected European society, countries and infrastructures are increasingly reliant upon their neighbours, both under normal operating conditions and in the event of an incident. Despite this, there is no common European methodology for measuring resilience or for implementing resilience concepts, and different countries and sectors employ their own techniques. There is also no shared, well-developed system-of-systems approach, which would be able to test the effects of dependencies and interdependencies between individual critical infrastructures and sectors. This increases the risk as a result of reliance on critical infrastructures, as well as affects the ability for sharing resources for incident planning due to no common terminology or means of expressing risk. The overall objective of IMPROVER is to improve European critical infrastructure resilience to crises and disasters through the implementation of combinations of societal, organisational and technological resilience concepts to real life examples of pan-European significance, including cross-border examples. This implementation will be enabled through the development of a methodology based on risk evaluation techniques and informed by a review of the positive impact of different resilience concepts on critical infrastructures. The methodology will be cross sectoral and will provide much needed input to standardisation of security of infrastructure.

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.

Ro-ro ships are an important component of the global transportation system, but an increasing trend of ro-ro ship fires in recent years call for improved fire protection. From comprehensive ship operators’ experience and by participation in ongoing work for the European Maritime Safety Agency and the International Maritime Organization (IMO), critical aspects of ro-ro ship fire safety have been identified to form the scope of the project LASH FIRE. It aims to provide a recognized technical basis for the revision of international IMO regulations, which greatly enhances fire prevention and ensures management of fires on ro-ro ships without recourse to external intervention. This is done by developing and demonstrating operational and design solutions which strengthen the fire protection of ro-ro ships in all stages of a fire and which address current and future challenges, including regulatory issues. Twenty specific challenges have been identified, which will be addressed by new solutions developed and demonstrated with regards to performance and ship integration feasibility by system suppliers, researchers, ship owners and shipyards. For the solutions to be considered for regulatory uptake, their impact on risk reduction and cost will be assessed and advisory groups with operators and flag states will be established. Thereby, the project is expected to significantly strengthen the independent fire protection of ro-ro ships and to reduce the frequency of ro-ro ship fires by 35% and the number of fatalities by 45%.