In the last ten years, natural hazards have caused 2 billion causalities and costed up to $1.4 trillion worldwide, as registered in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT, 2017). In Europe, disasters caused around 7 million causalities and up to €113 billion of overall economic losses in the decade 2007-2017. In this period, floods is the biggest hazard in terms of occurrence, affected people and economic damage in Europe, while the deadliest hazard remains extreme temperature, followed by flood and earthquake. Wildfires are less impacting; however, it ranks second in affected people.
I-REACT (Improving Resilience to Emergencies through Advanced Cyber Technologies) integrates existing services, both local and European, into a platform that supports the entire emergency management cycle. In particular, it implemented a multi-hazard system with a focus on floods, fires, and extreme weather events, as they are the most impacting natural hazard affected by climate change. To reach this objective, it brings together a multidisciplinary team of 20 partners from researchers and technologists to industry leaders, UN officials, consultants or communicators.
I-REACT targets all three emergency management phases. The first one mainly deals with the "preparation" of a community to reduce the impact of future disasters. For this, I-REACT integrated historical data, real-time reports, weather data and satellites observations to derive detailed statistics and accurate risk maps. These maps, coupled with a decision support system, allow decision-makers to effectively plan prevention measures aimed at increasing the resilience to future disasters. The second is the "preparedness". During this phase, the coordination between governments, civil organizations and citizens have been promoted to be prepared in case of an emergency. To reach this objective, I-REACT analyzed weather forecasts, data from both local and European early warning systems, such as the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) and the European Forest Fire Information (EFFIS), and warnings extracted from social media or received through crowdsourced reports from authorities and citizens, as well as using the I-REACT mobile application. The third one is the "emergency response", in which an effective reaction, first aid, and evacuation are crucial.
To help responders, he I-REACT solutions allow getting a quick and complete operational picture thanks to the ingestion of real-time citizen reporting and its integration in nowcast and forecast models. To improve self-protection behavior and reduce exposure, I-REACT supports public authorities to immediately warn citizens with real-time information and instructions
