Migration implies several societal opportunities and challenges. The migration process itself is coupled with a number of interrelated risks and threats -such as human trafficking and public health threats - for all stakeholders including border agencies, NGOs and the migrants themselves. This situation implies a need for more cross-sectoral, transdisciplinary and cross-country cooperation in all risk management phases. Existing risk analysis models have a number of shortcomings such as limited consideration of humanitarian aspects, which prevent the unfolding of their full potential.
The CRiTERIA project seeks to strengthen and expand existing risk analysis methods, by introducing novel approaches, such as identifying risk factors from qualitative evidence, building composite indicators, incorporating risk interaction and risk cascading assessments and consolidating the human security and human rights dimensions of border security. Strong and accurate risk and vulnerability analysis models have to be backed by effective intelligent analysis technology and tools. In CRiTERIA, we will develop and evaluate advanced analysis technologies and tools that are tailored to the new comprehensive risk and vulnerability indicators of the methodology.
In summary, the goal of the CRiTERIA project is a novel, comprehensive but feasible and human-rights sensitive risk and vulnerability analysis framework for border agencies and other stakeholders, which backs a novel multi-perspective risk and vulnerability analysis methodology with multi-source, multi-lingual analysis technologies and tools for serving the complex indicators of the methodology and for making them accessible in a verifiable and understandable way. The methodology will be developed and validated in close collaboration with practitioners from border agencies.
For achieving its goal, five objectives have been defined: 1) a refined multi-perspective risk, vulnerability and threat understanding; 2) tools for effective cross-media and multi-source risk and vulnerability analysis including validation support; 3) awareness for the evolutionary character of the realm of observation; 4) integrative and impactful solutions, which can be easily adopted; 5) actionable insights, which help decision makers and border agencies to counteract risks as well as the negative impacts resulting from them; and 6) legally compliant and societally acceptable solutions.