The recent COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis have taught us hard lessons about the vulnerability of our societies to disasters, especially when several events worsen their impact. These compounding events have become more frequent and are expected to result in more complex disruptions in our critical sectors. These systemic risks, caused by the cascading impact of disasters, where direct damage in one sector leads to indirect losses in another, put a test to the resilience of our societies. Recent examples of such compounding events include the 2021 eruption of the Soufriere volcano during the COVID-19 pandemic on the Caribbean Island of Saint Vincent, the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in February 2023, compounding the effect of the civil war, or the devastating cross border flooding in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany in 2021.
Disaster risk management stakeholders face the challenge of adapting their risk reduction policies and emergency plans but often lack the tools to account for the cross-sectoral impacts and the dynamic nature of the risks involved. The PARATUS project aims to fill this gap by developing an open-source platform for dynamic risk assessment that allows to analyze and evaluate multi-hazard impact chains, risk reduction measures, and disaster response scenarios in the light of systemic vulnerabilities and uncertainties.
These services are co-created within a unique transdisciplinary consortium of research organizations, NGOs, SMEs, first and second responders, and local and regional authorities. To gain a deeper understanding of multi-hazard impact chains, PARATUS conducted forensic analyses of historical disaster events, added hazard interactions and sectorial impacts to historical disaster databases, and exploited remote sensing data with artificial intelligence methods. Building on these insights, PARATUS aims to develop new exposure and vulnerability analysis methods that enable systemic risk assessment across sectors (e.g. humanitarian, transport, communication) and geographical settings (e.g. islands, mountains, megacities). These methods will be used to analyze risk changes across space and time, and to develop new scenarios and risk mitigation options together with stakeholders, using innovative serious games and social simulations. The approaches and tools are developed and tested together with stakeholders from four case study areas. With the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, the project analyses the optimal location of evacuation and logistics centers in this Megacity. In the Alps, the project analyses together with the highway authority how major obstruction of the cross-border Brenner corridor can be reduced. In the Caribbean, the project supports regional organizations in developing suitable multi-hazard risk assessment approaches, such as impact-based forecasting, and works with national stakeholders on risk-informed planning. In Romania, the project works with the National Civil Protection organization on improving disaster preparedness for complex events in Bucharest.
The results will be hosted on two stakeholder hubs, one on CMINE (for first responders) and one on a platform for humanitarian applications, which will provide stakeholders with a set of tools for risk reduction planning in dynamic multi-hazard environments. The service-oriented approach with active stakeholder involvement will maximize the uptake and impact of the project and help to increase Europe’s resilience to compounding disasters.
