Open topic on driving innovation uptake of disaster risk solutions

Expected Outcome

Project results are expected to contribute to some or all of the following expected outcomes:

• Accelerated adoption of high-TRL (Technology Readiness Level) disaster risk solutions across diverse sectors;
• Facilitated integration of innovative technologies into existing disaster prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery frameworks;
• Promoted collaboration among stakeholders to scale proven solutions and enhance resilience;
• Addressed barriers to deployment, ensuring accessibility and usability of advanced DRS technologies;
• Strengthened evidence-based decision-making through demonstration and validation of high-TRL solutions in real-world scenarios;
• Promoted visibility of civil security research results.

Scope

This topic aims to foster the widespread adoption and integration of high-TRL (Technology Readiness Level) disaster risk solutions (DRS) across multiple sectors, enhancing societal resilience to various hazards, including climate. The focus is on overcoming barriers to deployment, ensuring accessibility, and strengthening collaboration among stakeholders to drive innovation uptake. Projects should promote the adoption of high-TRL solutions by public and private sector organizations involved in disaster risk management, developing strategies for scaling and commercializing innovative DRS technologies to ensure they reach end-users efficiently. They should also demonstrate how these technologies can complement or replace existing disaster preparedness, response, and recovery frameworks by developing integrated governance and coordination models across sectors and levels for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery in multi-hazard and cascading risk scenario interoperability standards, and guidelines for integrating new solutions into national and European civil protection systems. The project should especially liaise and support other disaster resilience projects in driving their uptake as well as examine how to build synergy pathways with other preparedness grants, such as Knowledge for Action in Prevention & Preparedness (KAPP) funding call of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM).

Addressing deployment barriers is crucial, including identifying and mitigating technical, regulatory, financial, and social obstacles hindering the uptake of advanced solutions, while ensuring accessibility and usability for diverse stakeholders such as first responders, local authorities, and communities and individuals in a vulnerable situation. Projects should also demonstrate the real-world effectiveness of high-TRL solutions through large-scale pilot projects and demonstrations, generating robust evidence to support data-driven decision-making and optimize disaster risk reduction strategies. Initiatives should consider the capacity gaps of the UCPM[1], align with EU disaster resilience objectives and build on existing programs, ensuring synergies with relevant policies, funding mechanisms, and technological ecosystems. The private-public cooperation chapter of the Preparedness Union Strategy should especially be a guiding document. Proposals are encouraged to incorporate digital tools, AI-driven analytics, digital twins such as Destination Earth, IoT applications, and other emerging technologies to enhance disaster preparedness and response.

Proposals should have a strategy to promote the visibility of the project and the results to the broader public in order to show the potential of European civil security research (political sphere, private sector, citizens). This could entail the European Civil Protection Forum and the European Commission Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre platform as examples.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content should be addressed only if relevant in relation to the objectives of the research effort.

Technology Readiness Level - Technology readiness level expected from completed projects

Activities are expected to achieve TRL 8 by the end of the project - see General Annex B.

[1] eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52025DC0286