RESILENS Workshop – 8th Meeting of the European Commission ‘Community of Users’ on Secure, Safe and Resilient Societies, Brussels

On the 14^th of September, the RESILENS project (coordinated by FAC) hosted a Workshop as part of the 8th Meeting of the European Commission ‘Community of Users’ on Secure, Safe and Resilient Societies in Brussels, Belgium. The workshop served to offer attendees a more thorough and detailed overview of RESILENS’ progress to date, including the development of its key outputs – the ERMG (European Resilience Management Guideline), associated Toolkit, and the RES-DSP (RESILENS Decision Support Platform).  It was also an important opportunity for the RESILENS C.I (Critical Infrastructure) partners – Irish Water (Ireland), BASt (Germany), and EDPD and CML (Portugal) to present their experience of the ERMG and Toolkit development and Pilot Demonstrations (testing phase). Presentations were delivered by Justin Brennan, Ulrich Bergerhausen and Paulo Alberto respectively.

These Pilot Demonstrations aimed to operationalise and validate the draft ERMG and management tools (ReMMAT) across a number of CI and public settings, in conditions which were as close to real world conditions as possible. This was achieved through a series of real world, or simulated real world, pilot actions, to demonstrate the applicability of the ERMG and ReMMAT in relation to different forms of threats/risks and within the context of varying types of CI and spatial scales. During the Workshop, the C.I partners reflected on this process, highlighting the benefit and importance of bringing different organisations and stakeholders to work together, face to face, to address resilience and C.I interdependencies. Benefits included, for example, establishing lines of communication, developing contacts and relationships, understanding different organisational functions, services and limitations, and laying the groundwork for a collaborative approach to preparing for and responding to incidents/crises.

The Workshop also enabled the RESILENS consortium to gather invaluable feedback from the European Commission; National, Regional and Local policy makers; C.I operators; academics and law enforcement agencies across Europe. This feedback will contribute to ongoing refinements to the RESILENS outputs, as the project enters its final months.

The RESILENS Workshop followed a two-day joint Workshop entitled ‘Aligning the Resilience Related Research Efforts in the EU DRS Projects’ which showcased the ongoing work and collaboration between DRS7&14 projects – DARWIN, IMPROVER, RESILENS, RESOLUTE, SmartResilience, and SMR.

For more information on RESILENS, please see www.resilens.eu or follow us on Twitter @resilens_eu

Original post: http://resilens.eu/resilens-workshop-community-of-users/