DRMKC taking a one-step further
Interview with Alessandra Zampieri, Deputy Director of the “Space, Security and Migration” Directorate, and Head of the Disaster Risk Management Unit of the Joint Research Centre.
By Knowledge Network – Staff member
The 5th Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre (DRMKC) Annual Seminar took place on 17-18 November, after two years of break caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. What are the news from the DRMKC’s community after so long?
We are back! After two years of deep changes, for the entire world and within our team, we are back with even stronger ambitions for the DRMKC.
During the Annual Seminar, we could count on the active participation of representatives from more than 40 countries, following different sessions and engaging in lively discussions through many interesting questions and comments. Many more joined us through livestreaming. The input from the audience was extremely valuable to understand the expectations of the community and of the UCPM Member and Participating States and to guide our challenging but exciting next steps.
The Implementing Act of the Knowledge Network put DRMKC at the core of its Science Pillar. We are already at work to make this transition happen: from a mainly internal knowledge centre of the Commission, cochaired by JRC and DG ECHO and coordinating the DRM efforts of 12 policy directorates general, the DRMKC is ready to become the reference knowledge centre for all Member and Participating States. We look forward to having productive working relations ahead, supporting the elicitation of the vast DRM-related knowledge from the national scientific communities across the UCPM, for the benefit of the entire European DRM community.
It looks like you are calling for a participatory approach to the Knowledge Network’s Science Pillar. How do you plan to achieve this?
Only by proactively sharing our respective knowledge and know how, collaboratively mapping our standing needs and jointly creating new synergies, we will be able to build a Science Pillar which will be owned and productively used by all of us. Moreover, as it emerged during the Annual Seminar, it is not only about “knowing what we don’t know”, it is also about “learning how to use what we already know”
Nowadays there is a large part of scientific information which is still not (fully) exploited due to lack of awareness, understanding and operationalisation capability. We are already trying to move in this direction. For instance, DRMKC collaborates with the CONRIS Network for Risk, Safety & Security Studies and the Coventry University, which is hosting a series of 12 online, open-access Disaster Risk Management Training seminars between September 2021 and April 2022. They provide international, state of the art, evidence-based knowledge, which should contribute to the quality of DRM practices. As I mentioned, this is only one example of the many more collaborations we aim to create with the interested national scientific entities in the context of the Knowledge Network’s Science Pillar. Finally, it will also be crucial to establish a close collaboration with the Capacity Building Pillar of the Knowledge Network.
The discussions during the Annual Seminar highlighted the fact that the practitioners/science interface is as important as the policy makers/science one. The experience of professionals in handling disasters is the only way to proof-test the usefulness of our policies and scientific concepts and orient all future efforts.
The Annual Seminar made clear the DRMKC’s global dimension and ambitions, with contributors from all over the world. Will there be a place in the Science Pillar for the local stakeholders to express their point of view, share their knowledge and engage in the debate?
The local level is where science and policy meet reality. It is crucial to have local communities represented and engaged in the work of the Science Pillar. Failing to address the local dimension of Disaster Risk Management and Reduction means failing to translate science and knowledge into practice. Therefore, we will treasure the contribution of local stakeholders to the debate and exchanges within the Science Pillar!
At the Annual Seminar, for example, we made sure to have this point of view represented among the invited speakers. In the session “Science for Union Disaster Resilience Goals” we had the project coordinator of “Resilient Europe and Societies by Innovating Local Communities” (RESILOC) sharing how the project is helping to translate global concepts and frameworks, like the Sendai Framework targets, into something applicable and useful at local level, to assess and improve the resilience of local communities.
Some of the DRMKC tools are already being adapted to address the local level. The INFORM risk index, a global, objective and transparent tool for understanding the risk of humanitarian crises and disasters, is updated into a subnational version for Caucasus and Central Asia (8 countries) and for South Eastern Europe (3 countries). It will help develop a common understanding of the root causes of risks and improve DRR strategies at the regional and national level for a long-term risk reduction perspective.
Another example is the Risk Data Hub, a geospatial web platform that presents pan-European data and methodologies for disaster risk and vulnerability assessment. It is designed to include in the analysis also local data and, to a limited extent, it already does so: by clicking on a country in the web platform, one can focus on its administrative divisions. There is also a possibility for customisation under a profile with restricted access: each interested user from national authorities can acquire such type of access and make use of the Risk Data Hub in its own way. By uploading their data, they can then visualise and analyse it in conjunction with all those that are already present in the platform, as, for example, Austria did in the past.
How are the outcomes of the Annual Seminar going to inform the implementation of the Science Pillar?
The 5th Annual Seminar is for us only the beginning of a sustained dialogue. We are now in the process of analysing in detail outcomes of the event, all comments and suggestions, to make sure to translate them into foundation elements of the roadmap for the Science Pillar.
At the seminar, we discussed some of the current hot-topics for DRM, like the definition of the Union Disaster Resilience Goals and the design of transboundary, crosssectorial, challenging scenarios to test them against in the coming years. In this, we should be guided by the idea of “thinking the unthinkable”: we should not stop at what we have experienced in the past, we should go beyond and reason around what this new society, with its new threats – and combinations of them – might bring us to cope with in the future.
Both COVID-19 pandemic and the developments of the climate change impacts are clear signs of the need to go beyond what is considered probable, to be prepared also for what is only plausible. However, to be so visionary, we need everyone’s engagement! We will certainly build our first ideas for the roadmap of the Science Pillar around the results of the DRMKC Annual Seminar. But we also hope it to be a continuous exchange with the scientific community, the practitioners and the policy makers, with opportunities to coshape it as we go along.
The scientific activities of the Knowledge Network are led by the Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre, the Commission's science and knowledge service. Established in 2015, it brings together experts and knowledge from different locations inside and outside the Commission to provide solid scientific evidence for policy-making.
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The Knowledge Network – Staff member
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