Current projects
LOCALIENCE - Developing resilience against extreme weather threats at local level in Central Europe (CE100182)
The overall aim of LOCALIENCE is to develop disaster response capacities of municipalities, especially through developing knowledge and methods of rapid response to extreme weather events caused by climate change, as well as the effective management of the effects of such events, and to disseminate solutions supporting local level climate resilience and biodiversity restoration to Central European settlements.
LOCALIENCE connects transnational partners facing similar extreme weather threats, benefitting from a vast Central European pool of professional institutions and their experience, exploring solutions aimed at multiple aspects of the same challenge but offering sound learning and transfer potential, transnational peer-review and co-creation, as well as long-term networking, data sharing and service integration prospects in a compact geographical area.
The specific objectives of LOCALIENCE (as well as its main activities) are:
- Providing jointly developed tools for policy development, action planning and monitoring, to improve local, regional and national levels of disaster management, to increase resilience against extreme weather events caused by climate change.
- Strengthening public and civil stakeholder preparedness, proactivity and engagement via training, knowledge sharing and awareness raising.
- Developing and testing small-scale, local solutions ( particularly relevant to the country's weather conditions and disaster management system) to increase local level resilience and preparedness concerning extreme weather threats caused by climate change, building on intensified stakeholder interaction and IT solutions.
The project will last 3 years and involve 11 partners from 5 countires. It is financed from the European Union programme - Interreg Central Europe 2021-2027.
COLLARIS Network: COLLaborative network on unmanned AeRIal Systems
Scientific advances as well as fast-evolving drone technology and its applications have today become indispensable in all phases of the disaster risk management cycle. COLLARIS is a capacity-building initiative to develop a sustainable European network of scientific, engineering, and end-user expertise related to unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in civil protection and disaster response.
COLLARIS covers the following thematic focus areas:
- identification and sharing of operational procedures, lessons learnt, and best practices using UAS
- elaboration of air traffic management challenges, solutions, and operational practices
- acquisition of solutions for data analysis and data sharing, as well as auxiliary support systems (e.g. simulators)
- development of methods for increasing end-user competences
- foresight of new developments and future use case scenarios to identify tomorrow’s needs and gaps, technological capabilities, and their potential applications
The general concept of COLLARIS is based on two assumptions: That the technical capabilities related to UAS will continue to develop rapidly, as will the scope of their application for civil protection and crisis management purposes; and that the gap between these recently created technical capabilities and the practical needs and operational practices of civil protection not utilising them yet will remain a permanent challenge. Therefore, there is a clear need for establishing a stable long-term mechanism to continuously support the civil protection community in gradual implementing innovations enabled by UAS developments. The COLLARIS-based community will make an important contribution to achieve that.
COLLARIS will offer a networking platform as part of the Union Civil Protection Knowledge Network for information exchange and experimentation with advanced concepts of UAS for disaster response and crisis management. These activities are accompanied by thematic workshops, webinars, and moderated discussions as well as trials and embedded first responder trainings, aimed at increasing the efficiency of UAS operations by bringing knowledge closer to operational use.
Representatives of civil protection authorities at all levels, first responders, crisis management practitioners, and researchers interested in issues related to further development and operational use of UAS in their activities are cordially invited to join the COLLARIS Network initiatives.
Please contact us directly: Collaris-network@cbk.waw.pl
COLLARIS Network is coordinated by Crisis Information Centre CBK PAN (PL), with MSB (SE), Valabre (FR), DCNA (AT) and KIOS (CY) as consortium partners.
Duration: January 2023 - December 2024
Overwatch - more than a map
Overwatch project will develop an integrated holographic system that will support emergency and crisis management for wildfires and floods.
Leveraging on the state-of-the-art approach, OVERWATCH will design and develop a backend management platform that will cover the whole lifecycle of data management going from the data ingestion, harmonization, standardization, and data processing into exploitable information that will allow:
- to have a situation awareness in 2D and 3D of the flooding and fire events, e.g. measuring direct and indirect impacts in the affected area, event monitoring in real-time with a high-resolution video (visible, thermal, and hyperspectral);
- to manage operations according to the structure of terrain detected by drones;
- to implement the most suitable rescue assets according to the severity of the incident;
- connection of the responders through AR devices that will be virtually immersed in the real world;
- to monitor the exact position of the involved operators and assets.
Last but not least the backend management platform will allow collaboration of different kinds of users, with different roles that will manage information sources, exploit new ones or integrate other crisis management systems in order to have a cooperative system that will provide a comprehensive crisis overview.
The solution will support emergency and crisis management covering a wide range of situations, proactive approach and insightful guidance will contribute to shape the right implementation plan suitable to the needs of the different audiences we are addressing.
OVERWATCH consortium is composed of 10 partners across 5 different countries: Poland, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Denmark. This consortium represents key stakeholders within the value chain of solutions for safety and crisis management, each one contributing with specific valuable knowledge to meet OVERWATCH objectives.
Start date: 1st November 2022.
Project duration 3 years
Project funded in the Horizon Europe Programme (CALL:HORIZON-EUSPA-2021-SPACE) under Grant Agreement 101082320.
The webside of Overwatch project
USeEO – Custom EO Tools for Resilience Management in Poland
This project aims to develop and validate a set of customized Earth Observation (EO) derived information products to support the different stakeholders working in the resilience sector in Poland and verify the utility and benefits resulting from the use of these products. The consulted end-users have identified the following areas of interest to be addressed within this project:
- detection of damages in the area of crisis situation,
- monitoring of land cover changes in risk areas,
- detection of areas prone to local flooding from underground waters,
- monitoring of ice cover on rivers using VHR data,
- monitoring of water bodies extend using VHR data,
- monitoring of land subsidence,
- integration of the various information layers into an integrated assessment capability for
- resilience management.
For each of the above mentioned use cases, the project consortium will provide a set of customised products and digital service based on EO data, which will be exploited and examined by the first responders.
Through the close collaboration with the end users, constructive feedback on the practical utility of the listed products in the emergency situations and decision making processes will be gathered and transformed into helpful information to further support the users’ actions and decision making process and provide guidelines for the possible next steps to support practical implementation of EO solutions in the end-users' everyday work.
Apart from developing and validating a pre-defined set of EO products and IT solutions, the project results will contribute to:
- prove the utility of EO data gathered within EU Copernicus Program,
- develop cooperation framework between technology providers and end-users in the crisis management domain,
- demonstrate that the access to EO data can be easy and intuitive for crisis responders,
- develop the EO based products and services adjusted to the user needs, which can be easily integrated with other tools and integrated with an existing management systems,
- develop Roadmap for future improvements and more advanced EO data implementation,
- demonstrate the possibilities to extend developed EO-based solutions to other regions and countries.
The UseEO projekt is carried out under the Polish Industry Incentive Scheme within ESA. The consortium is led by Astri Polska, with CBK PAN, Institute of Geodesy and Cartography and Satim Ltd. as partners.
Duration: 12 May 2021 - 11 May 2023
ProSPeReS - Protection System for large gatherings of People in Religious Sites
ProSPeReS project focuses on protecting religious sites from terrorist attacks. It was selected by the European Commission for funding from the Internal Security Fund – Police for the years 2014-2020 (ISFP). It is a special fund, which aims to implement the internal security strategy, cooperation in the enforcement of law and management of the external borders of the European Union.
Religious sites are considered to be especially vulnerable to attacks due to their accessibility and the fact that there are usually limited security measures applied. In recent years, religious sites of different faiths were targeted by extremists. The feedback collected from religious institutions and authorities suggests that there is a growing concern about the security issues and a balance should be kept between security and preservation of the open nature of religious sites.
Thus, the project is aimed at increasing the level of protection in places of worship by forming an outstanding cooperation of scientists, security experts and practitioners, public services and religious institutions (representing Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox Church and Jewish Community) towards preparing a comprehensive protection system. The system will cover measures for increasing prevention, protection, deterring and responding to various types of terrorist threats and incidents that may occur in religious places, including attacks with CBRN agents. The measures will be comprised of a set of tailormade templates, tools, procedures, equipment, improvements in infrastructure according to “security in design” and protocols of cooperation with public services.
The implementation of the system will be enhanced by preparing and initiating modular training including eLearning with VR, applicable in various types of education in religious structures; conducting large-scale exercises; and conducting EU-wide awareness-raising campaign aiming at faith-based leaders, worshipers and public in general. The significant impact of the project at a European level appears achievable due to the fact of consulting the project idea with influential religious organizations and involving them in the consortium as well as receiving very positive feedback from international religious structures, that confirmed the relevance of the project assumptions and willingness to support the introduction of the system in all EU MS.
The approach of the project is to prepare a relevant, well-addressed and validated protection system and assure its EU-wide benefit to the protection of religious sites by cooperation among key stakeholders.
Therefore, the consortium is comprised of a large number of organizations (18) from 6 countries (Poland, Greece, Slovakia, Cyprus, Finland, the Netherlands), representing science and expert institutions, public services such as police, fire-fighters, crisis management, and last but not least the end-users - religious institutions and religious sites operators. The project is coordinated by the University of Łodz.
Duration: June 2020 - November 2023
Grant Agreement 101034230 — ProSPeReS — ISFP-2020-AG-PROTECT