Europe's cultural legacy is one of the richest in the world. It is a beacon that draws millions of people every year to our archaeological sites, churches, castles, monuments, museums, etc. Therefore, the protection and conservation of European Cultural Heritage is a priority for policy makers, guardians of these treasure, plus tourist and educators at the local and national levels. Cultural heritage is a known value. Heritage has effects in other economic sectors in line with the EU policy statement 'Towards an integrated approach to cultural heritage for Europe's realisation of the value of the EU heritage'.
EU heritage assets are extremely exposed to climate change and natural hazards, which threaten their integrity and may compromise their value. The loss or deterioration of these outstanding assets would negatively affect local and national communities, as well as for their socio-economic value.
The STORM project aims at providing critical decision making tools to all European CH stakeholders affected by climate change and natural hazards. The goal is to provide new innovative capabilities to improve existing processes related to three identified areas: Prevention, Intervention and Policies, planning and processes.
Therefore, the main STORM objectives are:
1. Select, evolve and integrate innovative environment assessment methodologies and services to effectively and accurately process, analyse and map environmental changes and/or natural hazards.
2. Define and implement an innovative methodology and a supporting service for the mitigation of natural hazards and climate change.
3. Provide innovative, cost effective, non-invasive and non-destructive methods and processes.
4. Define and implement models and services for generating and managing a situational picture based on the data/information collected from the field by physical and human sensors and evaluators (crowdsensing).
5. Provide innovative, methodologies, practices and software tools for more reliable maintenance, quick restoration and long-term conservation of the cultural heritage assets.
6. Define a collaboration and knowledge-sharing framework for the community of stakeholders to co-create, share and maintain improved practices, knowledge and experience on the disaster risk reduction practices.
7. Propose adaptations, changes in existing policies and validation of new knowledge in government processes.
8. Cost analysis for the sites protection against natural hazards exploiting the STORM data analytics tools.
Finally, the five STORM pilot sites and all the involved partners have contributed to assess and validate of the project outcomes, running experiments in two rounds to ensure an iterative process to improve the STORM solutions. All partners successfully implemented the experimental scenarios and provided detailed journal entries of their drills and experiments.
