eNOTICE, PROACTIVE and PANDEM-2 projects host three-day conference at BAO Centre, Brussels
(13 June 2023) Three EU-funded projects have jointly organised a three-day conference in Brussels to showcase their new tools and technologies developed to strengthen Europe’s response to future CBRNe (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive) and health crises. After a combined thirteen years of research, the eNOTICE, PROACTIVE (coordinated by UIC, the International Union of Railways) and PANDEM-2 projects are ready to showcase their developments including a fully integrated dashboard for pandemic management, toolkits for CBRNe practitioners and civil society and enhanced CBRNe training capacity. In collaboration with CMINE, the projects will meet with members of the European Commission including the REA, DG HOME, DG SANTE, DG HERA and ECDC who are a member of the PANDEM-2 Advisory Board.
While Covid-19 was spreading at a rapid rate, demonstrating the need to address CBRNe risks and threats, the eNOTICE, PROACTIVE and PANDEM-2 projects each worked on different aspects of crisis management and response with real-time inputs from public health agencies, first responders and civil society organisations across Europe. Although each project has distinct aims and objectives, they all worked towards one shared goal: to protect the public by ensuring better preparedness and response for future crises. In addition, the projects identified various common recommendations which apply to both CBRNe events and pandemics.
PROACTIVE partners Tony Godwin (CBRNE Ltd), Åsa Burlin (Umeå University) and project coordinator Grigore Havarneanu (UIC)
With combined funding of €18.5 million, the research between eNOTICE, PROACTIVE and PANDEM-2 tackles current challenges in crisis preparedness and response and provides solutions that acknowledge ongoing processes and systems currently used across Europe.
eNOTICE coordinators Jean-Luc Gala and Olga Vybornova from the Université catholique de Louvain speaking on the network status said:
“eNOTICE has matured to the point where it can contribute to capacity and capability building in the field of institutional and collective preparedness and response to CBRN cross-border events. Having mapped and labelled the capabilities of European training centres (TC), they are now categorised based on their expertise, training and testing capabilities, training infrastructure and specificities, and linked together via a continuously updated online information and communication platform – eNOTICE Community Center. From now on, this highly visible cooperative network is in a position to develop cross-disciplinary activities that bring together CBRN and safety stakeholders while striving for practitioner interoperability and procedure harmonisation.”
Grigore Havârneanu, Coordinator of the PROACTIVE project from the International Union of Railways, Paris, France added to this:
“PROACTIVE can help security practitioners make CBRNe crisis preparedness and response fair, accessible and inclusive. Over the last 50 months we’ve been liaising with more than 100 practitioner organisations and more than 50 civil society organisations, including vulnerable groups. These stakeholders have been directly engaged in our multitude of research and innovation activities. This strong engagement allowed PROACTIVE to co-create a crisis communication system for both practitioners and citizens as well as pre-incident information materials for the general public. These tools have been tested in three field training exercises where members of the public interacted with first responders. These outputs, combined with an Aide Memoire on how to include civil society in future exercises, will hopefully allow CBRNe practitioners and policymakers to improve societal resilience. I sincerely hope that PROACTIVE is a major step forward in bridging the gap between the technical aspects of CBRNe and behavioural science.”
Speaking at the conference today, PANDEM-2 coordinator Professor Máire Connolly from the University of Galway commented:
“Over the past two and a half years, PANDEM-2 has looked specifically at developing a suite of novel concepts, services and IT systems to improve how Europe prepares for and responds to future pandemics and now we’re ready to share these with Europe’s crisis managers. We’ve also developed innovations in training and increased capacity between EU member states responding to pandemics on a cross-border which we hope will continue even further. In recent years, we’ve seen more instances of cross-border crises, including climate change, terrorism, international trade disputes and global health threats. These emergency situations require large-scale planning for preparedness and response for countries to be able to cope with unforeseen challenges. To do this, we must collaborate and respond at an EU level which is why the conference today is so important and a step in that direction”.
For more information on the outputs of each project visit their corresponding websites here: eNOTICE, PROACTIVE, and PANDEM-2.
The link to the above Press Realease is: https://mailchi.mp/uic/three-major-pandemic-and-cbrn-projects-join-forces-to-strengthen-europes-capacity-against-future-health-crises?e=1970f1ba7d
