Compared to the past, recent disasters challenge society in terms of dealing with the unexpected, large scale, highly interconnected society and trans-boundary nature of events involving different countries, many private and public stakeholders and high expectations from the citizens. The DARWIN project addresses the improvement of responses to expected and unexpected crises affecting critical infrastructures and social structures. It covers the management of both man-made events (e.g. cyber-attacks) and natural events (e.g. severe weather). The overall objective and main result is the development of European resilience management guidelines. These will improve the ability of stakeholders to anticipate, monitor, respond, adapt, learn and evolve, to operate efficiently in the face of crises. All results of the project are public to facilitate their use. The target beneficiaries of DARWIN are crisis management actors and stakeholders responsible for public safety, such as critical infrastructures and service providers, as well as community groups.
The main objectives and results of the project were:
• Make resilience guidelines available for a particular critical infrastructure operator by developing and adapting the DARWIN resilience management guidelines (DRMG) to health care and air traffic management domains;
• Enable use of resilience guidelines in non-crisis situations supporting training and evaluation by delivering handouts to facilitate workshop, modules for a Master programme, material for lectures and proposing prototypes for simulation and serious games;
• Facilitate evolution of the guidelines proposing DARWIN Wiki as a knowledge management platform and by involving practitioners, that can evolve and integrate their needs and experiences;
• Establish a Community of Resilience and Crisis Practitioners (DCoP) by proposing highly interactive virtual and face to face activities to co-create and facilitate adaption and adoption of the DRMG. At peak the DCoP forum included 173 members from 25 countries;
• Build on lessons learned in the area of resilience by establishing a link between resilience capabilities and existing approaches and practices relevant for specific domains. This includes shared views from experts and practitioners from different domains;
• Carry out two pilot exercises that apply project results in two domains, the project performed more exercises than planned. Four pilot exercises were conducted addressing health care, air traffic management including cascade effects to other domains. Moreover, a small-scale evaluation was performed addressed highways. The evaluation actively involved 247 practitioners from 22 countries.
• Establish activities that will lead to project results being adapted to and later adopted by practitioners, workshops, webinars and presentations involving DCoP members have been performed. A white paper on resilience management was produced by five European projects with major contributions by the DARWIN consortium. Contribution to standardisation with knowledge from the project have been provided.
