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sCience and human factOr for Resilient sociEty

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CORE (sCience and human factOr for Resilient sociEty)

Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-09-01 do 2023-02-28

The complexity in disaster preparedness and response is one of most relevant challenges for people and organizations in charge of disaster risk reduction (DRR). A relevant component of such complexity relies on the wide diversity in levels of vulnerability, risk awareness, safety culture, social and science trust among interested populations either at regional or at European scale. The risk increase is driven by complex and interdependent urban systems and urban-rural inter-linkages. Population vulnerability is compounded by various risks such as climate change, terrorism, pandemics and cyber-attacks. A lesson learned by the recent COVID-19 crisis is that risk is systemic, and crises are cascading.
The CORE project addresses such topics and to reach its the main scope, i.e. to improve the focus on secure societies where citizens are facing increasingly threatening situations, developing a harmonized vision of crisis management awareness, through a transdisciplinary collaboration involving the environmental and social science communities, some activities have been undertaken. CORE identified a series of case studies from previous natural and manmade disasters including earthquake, flash-flood, tsunami, wildfire, industrial accident and terrorist attack. CORE extracted lessons learnt from a variety of perspectives including human factors, organizational issues and societal aspects, including gender and ethnicity, education, income, physical abilities, etc. CORE is designing a series of human centeredness indicators to measure the extent on which emergency plans and operations fits needs and characteristics of all considered social groups, defining a toolkit to measure how positive or negative safety culture is in the selected disaster scenarios.
To accomplish the overall objective to develop a harmonized vision of crisis management awareness and capability, several activities have been performed. The high-complexity events, which trigger systemic risks often overextend the established risk management measures and create new, unsolved challenges for policymaking in risk assessment and governance, have been considered. CORE identified the state of the art in risk management measures and relevant lessons learned from cross case analysis, by building on existing research and conducting a review of state-of-the-art literature published by academia, industry, and governments, identifying key innovation points to assess the origins of systemic risk particularly in relation to multi hazards. A state-of-the-art approach was required to harness the areas of opportunity in the governance of such risks by formulating a holistic management system of disaster-related systemic risks and coordinate policy response. To strengthen the holistic management of disaster-related systemic risks, this research has integrated the SFDRR priorities for action. The findings from the 7 case studies are integrated to derive lessons learnt considering the areas for improvement and key recommendations.
CORE has developed a social science framework using downward counterfactuals and a framework for risk cascades has been developed using the Bow-Tie methodology, augmented by Closed-Loop Diagrams.
CORE delivered a comparative analysis of preparedness and security of supply, mapping how it is organised within the disaster risk management frameworks of selected EU countries focusing on differences concerning pre-positioning, training, framework contracts, and supplier management.
CORE has designed a toolkit to measure the degree of positivity or negativity of safety culture in disaster scenarios. It will be tested through a field survey with professional and volunteer rescuers, rescue managers, public institutions involved in disaster management and citizens. CORE has produced a vulnerability taxonomy and related Critical Vulnerability Indicators in the prospect of better understanding which factors may perform as precursors or inhibitors of vulnerability, but also contribute to manage it during a disaster. CORE will define a set of human-centredness indicators to measure the extent to which emergency plans and operations are adapted to the needs, characteristics and capabilities of all social groups considered.
CORE examined the communication patterns of European citizens on social media over time and during and after disasters and emergencies. The work performed is focused on four specific data analyses based on a unique social media database. The database is based on two sources: Twitter and Wikipedia.
How people cope with possible disasters depends on a lot of factors, and in many cases reactions to emergency situations do not depend by rational decisions.
How individuals and groups apply knowledge, interpret data and adopt their own criteria for decision making with respect to known/unknown risks is something strongly affected by their culture, behaviours and knowledge commonly shared within a community. In other words, culture can be considered as the reference framework to assess if something is acceptable/normal/usual or not. In the DRR context, culture and safety culture are the framework that enable individuals and organizations to reach an appropriate risk awareness, to benefit from shared knowledge and practices, to engage themselves in cooperative, and finally more effective, disaster management.
CORE project has embraced such concepts and will consider communities perspectives by using a transdisciplinary approach.
More in details the project has:

• identified a series of case studies from previous natural and manmade disasters and crisis incidents
• extracted lessons learnt from a variety of perspectives including human factors, organizational issues and societal aspects, including gender and ethnicity, education, income, physical abilities, etc.
• analysed communication patters, including social media, mobile applications, web sites etc., in EU countries during routine and crise periods
• created and started implementing a communication and dissemination plan to ensure the maximization of the project impact

In the last months of the project, CORE will:

• examine the public messaging challenges faced by authorities responsible for decision-making and associated processes, extracting best practices and lessons learned
• analyse disaster preparedness strategies, including vulnerable categories behavior analysis;
• analyse how cultural changes among individuals, business managers, government officials, and communities can create a resilient society in Europe, in line with the SFDRR
• compare EU countries focusing on differences in preparedness and DRR mechanisms with regards to prepositioning, training, framework contracts and supplier management
• define of a series of human centeredness indicators allowing to measure to what extent emergency plans and operations fits needs and characteristics of all considered social groups, measuring how positive or negative safety culture is in disaster scenarios
• evaluate the role of risk cost-benefit analysis for planning, decision making and for enhancing safety culture. Analysis on the role of testing, validation and trust for enhancing safety culture
• organize a competition with high schools to create the CORE APP containing useful information about how to behave in emergency situations and suggestions on how to increase preparedness. The young generation become a sort of "prevention sentinels"
Human factor-Science
Core methodology