The IPA DRAM project took place between December 2016 and November 2019 as part of the European Union’s Instrument of Pre-Accession (IPA) programmes, aimed at strengthening the political, legal and technical structures of EU candidate countries or potential candidates from the Western Balkans. The partner countries involved were Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. The project was funded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Civil Protection and European Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG ECHO) to promote disaster assessment at the national and regional levels.
The main goal of the project was to improve the capacities of partner countries in natural disaster risk management. In particular, IPA DRAM was carried out through three thematic areas: disaster risk assessment; disaster loss data (for the analysis of damage data that help to understand the patterns according to which a natural disaster may occur—an area of work carried out in accordance with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction ); and, finally, risk mapping.
The project supported the civil protection authorities of the countries in the development of national risk assessment plans and led to the creation of ERRADRAM, a regional atlas aimed at aggregating damage and risk data of the countries involved. Developed from the myDEWETRA platform, the atlas was made available to the countries involved in the project as a tool to support the planning and management of natural risks.
Within IPA DRAM, several activities have also been carried out to share technological knowledge, to train operators and other stakeholders involved in risk management – including academics – and to implement the capacity at the national and regional level to operate more effectively on the issues of disasters and their mitigation. These activities were carried out through workshops, held regularly throughout the duration of the project, promoting exchanges between experts and participation in international congresses, and with training periods, conducted both in Italy and in the other partner countries.
Globally, the IPA DRAM project has contributed to creating new synergies and coordination between the countries involved, both through the creation of tools to support risk assessment and through training and the construction of networks of regional experts (especially on the issues of earthquakes, fires, and damage cataloguing), thus providing support to the development of civil protection strategies. CIMA Research Foundation has provided the technical expertise necessary for the realization of the project in its different objectives: it has assisted the risk assessment processes at the national level, supported the coordination of data exchange and risk mapping processes, promoted the methodologies to catalogue damage data and, finally, coordinated the information exchange within the ERRADRAM platform.
* This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244/1999 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence
