The EU-funded H2020 PROACTIVE project, coordinated by the UIC Security Division, held its 16th consortium meeting on 12-13 June 2023 and its Joint Final Conference, together with two other EU-funded projects, on 13-15 June 2023 in Brussels, Belgium.
During the 16th Progress Meeting, the consortium partners exchanged information about the ongoing tasks and recent project activities. The meeting was an excellent opportunity for the project partners to discuss the achievements, challenges and lessons learned from the third field exercise held in Ranst, Belgium, which was organised by Campus Vesta in conjunction with the EU funded H2020 project eNOTICE, in light of the upcoming deliverable, to be published in July.
The project consortium meeting was closely followed by the final public event. More than 120 participants attended either physically in Brussels or online the Joint Final Conference of the three EU-funded projects eNOTICE, PROACTIVE and PANDEM-2. These projects collectively focus on enhancing preparedness, response capabilities, and coordination among stakeholders to improve crisis management strategies in the areas of CBRNe incidents and pandemics.
On the first day eNOTICE and PROACTIVE partners presented key results and recommendations from co-organising field training exercises which aimed to improve CBRNe preparedness and response. Two out of the three exercises co-organised by PROACTIVE involved chemical incidents in the railway environment. In addition, external stakeholders from the PROACTIVE Civil Society Advisory Board shared testimonies and lessons learned from partaking in the exercises as observers.
In order to maximize the impact of the projects’ results, the second day of the conference began with a synergy session whereby 11 other EU funded projects discussed their relevance with eNOTICE, PROACTIVE and PANDEM-2 results.
Up next, PROACTIVE provided a training workshop on its CBRNe Crisis Communication Toolkit. The Toolkit is intended as an innovative response tool which improves two-way communication between civil society and CBRNe practitioners and also contributes to preparedness through its CBRNe Library. The tool can also be useful to rail stakeholders interested in the mitigation of CBRNe risks and threats.
This was followed by a session where all three projects discussed the transferable lessons from the CBRNe domain to pandemics, and vice versa. Then, each project shared their key exploitable results and recommendations. The second day of the conference ended with an interactive panel discussion which was moderated by a representative from DG HOME. The third and final day of the joint conference covered only project PANDEM-2.
Many thanks to all the participants for their active contributions to the three-day event.
If you were unable to join, all the conference presentations are available here: https://www.cmine.eu/networks/events/114216/page/presentations
In addition, the recordings from the three-day event can be watched on YouTube at the following links:
Day 1 (First part) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubq6Y-F5_i0
Day 1 (Second part) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdw3afPMlIA
Day 2 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUDEXNeQtgk
Day 3 (Only PANDEM-2) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s6fnv-672k
The UIC Security Division will ensure that the PROACTIVE results applicable to the rail sector will be shared with UIC members. A future eNews article will be dedicated to this topic.
While the Final Conference is now over, the work within the PROACTIVE project continues until August 2023 with several deliverables remaining.
You can follow PROACTIVE on Twitter (@PROACTIVE_EU), on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/proactive-eu/), on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@PROACTIVE_EU) and on the project website https://proactive-h2020.eu/.
