Climate change poses a major challenge to the civil defense system because of its uncertainty and the increased frequency of extreme events that could result from it. It is in response to this challenge that the RECIPE project (Reinforcing Civil Protection Capabilities into Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment under Climate Change), which aimed to strengthen the civil protection system in emergency management and natural hazard planning in Europe and to address the impacts of climate change using an integrated, multi-risk approach.
Funded by the European Civil Protection Mechanism, RECIPE (January 2020-November 2021) brings together eight institutions from five different European countries (Austria, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain).
Researchers and technical operational staff worked to identify the main impacts of climate change on different natural phenomena (fires, heavy rains, floods, avalanches and landslides), with a multi-risk approach. Once these relationships are defined, the partnership studied and analyzed, with the support of local and national stakeholders, the interactions between possible future scenarios and prevention-preparedness actions to be implemented, as well as the needs of the civil protection system to address these new scenarios.
RECIPE wanted to develop guidelines and operational tools that can support the incorporation of climate change into risk assessments and natural hazard planning, and assist decision makers. The guidelines and operational tools (such as tools to collect monitoring observations made by citizens during an emergency situation, or for the visualization for the management of emergency situations in case of high avalanche risk) have be developed from pilot sites.
The exchange of knowledge and good practices among international networks, are the fundamental basis for making Europe more resilient to the effects of climate change.
Within the project, CIMA Research Foundation has implemented in the pilot site of Cinque Terre (Liguria) a participatory path for Civil Defense planning, through which a multi-risk, knowledge integration approach will be implemented, also capable of taking into account the potential effects of climate change on events, useful to strengthen and improve the capacity of the civil protection system to deal with risk situations and manage emergencies.
Through this process, guidelines for fire and flood risk civil protection planning with a participatory approach and an operational tool for collecting monitoring observations made by citizens during an emergency situation were constructed, which are part of the package of operational tools and guidelines produced by the project itself.