The EU-funded H2020 project PROACTIVE led by the UIC Security Division had a busy Spring 2022, attending several key events relevant to Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and explosive (CBRNe) security.
The CBRNE R&I conference took place in May in Lille, France, and PROACTIVE was actively involved with a project booth, a presentation, a poster, a panel and a demo. The booth was very useful for meeting some of our advisory board members face-to-face for the first time as well as recruiting new members to join us. Recruitment is ongoing and new practitioners are always welcome to sign up. The presentation focused on our ethical framework for including vulnerable groups in CBRN field exercise and the poster examined the acceptability of CBRNe tools and procedures.
During the CERIS (Community for European Research and Innovation for Security) panel, PROACTIVE discussed interagency cooperation, stakeholder engagement, filling in preparedness gaps, joint field exercises and making our results sustainable with other EU funded research projects. Lastly, during the demo, PROACTIVE showcased the main features its mobile app, which is currently available in a beta version on both Apple and Google app stores: citizens can report incidents to police, police can publish incidents to communicate with the public, a map shows previous incidents and the CBRNe Library for citizens to increase preparedness, and for practitioners to (privately) share SOPs.
Also in May, the ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) conference took place in Tarbes, France and was another opportunity to showcase the PROACTIVE app. This time, the focus was on the co-creation process PROACTIVE is undertaking alongside the Civil Society Advisory Board to ensure our app is accessible.
In June, the NBC Symposium took place in Lahti, Finland where we presented how PROACTIVE puts people, including vulnerable groups, at the heart of CBRN preparedness and response as well as the PROACTIVE recommendations for practitioners and policy makers. The different sets of recommendations are publicly available on the PROACTIVE website.
PROACTIVE was also invited to attend a field exercise organised by the eNOTICE project together with Campus Vesta in Belgium. The exercise was based on three different scenarios, each overlapping with one another: a fire at a chemical plant, an accident on a major motorway involving a car fire, and a building fire. The exercise was an opportunity for PROACTIVE and eNOTICE to begin to plan the next joint exercises, which will take place in November 2022 and May 2023.
PROACTIVE can be followed on Twitter (@PROACTIVE_EU) as well as on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/proactive-eu/) and the project website https://proactive-h2020.eu/.
