PROJECT DETAILS

Recent disasters around the world strongly indicate that the most challenging territories for flood and wildfire management are transboundary. Various reasons (economic, social, political, cultural) make it difficult to agree, establish and implement common strategies and policies dealing with climate change impacts, societal resilience and emergency management. A huge identified deficit in the utilization of research results and projects to strengthen civil protection systems exists in the border areas. Available technological advances and innovations cannot reach the fire brigade, forestry and civil protection services. due to lack of personnel, high rigidity in existing plans and procedures, inability to create cross-border standard operating procedures and most importantly to identify the cross-border area as a single area of intervention before and during an emergency. SOLVE creates a coherent risk prevention and management strategy and capacity-building framework for leveraging existing or underdeveloped prevention and mitigation strategies and tools. Floods - including occasional and urban - and wildfires - including wildfires in urban interfaces can be catastrophic and create political, social and economic problems, hindering any progress made on economic development and social cohesion, while at the same time can drive away investments. The cross-border area cannot afford to miss opportunities for growth and employment. SOLVE focuses on common actions for the most common risks (forest fires and floods). Main results: a) Modern equipment and joint training of operational teams (first responders), b) Provision of scientific support and knowledge (through innovative approaches, methodologies and tools for operational decision-making and c) Capitalization and inclusion of results. D) active participation of citizens in preventive activities through a participatory GIS platform and focused actions. Such an approach is novel and encourages cross-border cooperation on a sustainable basis, following the provisions of the new Civil Protection Law 4662/2020 and DG ECHO's 2020 cross-border cooperation guidelines. SOLVE has a dual-character approach: a) Working on the most common risks, building on the results of past and current successful projects and b) joint activities not only at the levels of risk assessment, early warning and management procedures, but also in the implementation of large large-scale joint exercises, joint training and immediate exploitation of the results at both the political and operational levels. The overall objective of SOLVE is to minimize the risks of forest fires (including wild-urban interfaces) and floods (including flash and urban floods) for the Lerins regional unit and the Pelagonia region in the long term and in a way that can be replicated in other cross-border areas . The SOLVE approach transforms the transboundary area from a problematic one in relation to disaster risk reduction and management to a promising one that encourages and facilitates cooperation.