Specific challenge:

Increasing resilience to crises and disasters requires an orchestrated set of actions, including standardisation. While dedicated research projects and new topics look into different aspects of resilience to be investigated and further developed, at the same time related opportunities and needs for standardisation to support disaster resilience have to be addressed. Such standardisation activities could e.g. significantly improve the technical, procedural, operational and semantic interoperability of command, control and communication systems for crisis and disaster management, or the interoperability of detection equipment and tools in the areas of CBRNE. An analysis of European standardisation needs has been carried out within the Mandate M487 to establish Security Standards, which has led to the identification of standardisation priorities, for three selected security sectors (CBRNE, Crisis Management, Border Security). Similar trends are developed worldwide, which opens the scope for international cooperation. Besides this, research is needed on a longer term to identify and further elaborate potential standardisation opportunities in other technological and non-technological areas where a significant contribution to improve the disaster resilience through standardisation can be expected.

Scope:

Proposals need to assess the feasibility and the expected impact of proposed standardisation activities that are not included in the sectors identified by the M487 Mandate (focusing on European Norms), including standards that could be developed at international level, the appropriate standardisation deliverable(s) and the expected time frame to finish the proposed activity. Relevant legislation on EU and Member State level, as well as international regulations, need to be taken into account appropriately, including potential ethical, societal and privacy issues of the proposed activities. Proposals need to show how duplication of efforts with relevant past or on-going research projects, and standardisation activities on European (e.g. CEN/TC 391) and international level (e.g. ISO/TC 223) will be avoided: how proposed activities will be coordinated with other, relevant activities like e.g. the EU action on enhancing the resilience of infrastructures[1], how a cross-fertilisation of work between the proposal and these relevant activities will be achieved and how the proposal consortium intends to involve itself in relevant CEN and/or ISO TC’s through international cooperation.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between €1m and €2m EUR would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Whereas activities will have an exclusive focus on civil applications, coordination with the activities of the European Defence Agency (EDA) may be considered with possible synergies being established with projects funded by the EDA programmes. The complementarity of such synergies should be described comprehensively. On-going work within the European Framework Cooperation (EFC) should be taken into account.

Expected impact:

- better assessment of feasibility and impact of standards in the identified areas;

- establishment of a standardisation roadmap at international (ISO) and European (EN) levels;

- improved coordination of activities at EU and international levels and cross-fertilisation among different sectors;

- improved complementary contribution to disaster resilience of populations, crisis and disaster management / civil protection and/or CBRNE systems, tools and services:

The action is expected to proactively target the needs and requirements of users, such as standardization bodies, security agents in the CBRNE area and civil protection units.

Up to one project will be co-funded.

Type of action: Coordination and Support Actions

[1] COM(2013) 216 final, An EU Strategy on adaptation to climate change, Action 7: Ensuring more resilient infrastructure