On 5th and 6th February in Rome, we officially launched the new project entitled “Empowering Citizens by Considering their Feedback in Preparedness Plans". The Empower-Citizens project is funded by the European Union as part of the Knowledge for Action in Prevention and Preparedness (KAPP) call of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM), and will last 2 years, until January 2027.
The project will develop and test a solution for using feedback and lessons learnt, acquired by citizens during disasters, exercises and simulations, in preparedness plans. Citizens’ first-hand experience, tacit knowledge and skills gained during these events are significant, and offer feedback and knowledge that are complementary to official professional actors, representing an important asset for the management of future events. The project will integrate citizens’ experience into the existing process of drafting and revising preparedness plans, and actively involve the public in preparedness activities. It will build on past EU and national projects to review, adapt, and integrate existing practices for eliciting, selecting, filtering and aggregating experience and feedback from citizens, communities and civil society organisations. These outputs will be merged into a procedure for revising and improving preparedness plans called “Citizen & Authority Learning and Improving Preparedness Plans” (CLIPP), including practical guidelines and support tools that will help authorities apply this approach in their local contexts. The CLIPP procedure will be evaluated in the revision of two real preparedness plans in Italy and Norway, with citizen-learned lessons at their core, and will subsequently be scaled up for a wider application at a European level.
“Now more than ever, we should recognise that involving citizens in preparedness actions and plans is crucial to building resilient communities and better responding to emergencies. In a time of increasingly frequent and severe disasters, Empower-Citizens project aims to pave the way to rethink how we do things and how we can work together to make our efforts more effective."
The project is coordinated by Deep Blue - a research and consultancy company specialising in Human Factors, safety and resilience, based in Rome, Italy. The Consortium further includes a Norwegian research institute on societal resilience - NTNU SAMFUNNSFORSKNING AS (NSR), an Italian civil society organisation - Cittadinanzattiva Onlus (CA), an Italian local authority - Comune di Castelraimondo (CR), and a Romanian national agency - Ministry of Internal Affairs Department of Emergency Situations (DSU). There are also two associated local authorities - Statsforvalteren i Innlandet (Norway) and Comune di Castelvecchio Calvisio (Italy).